
Class. 

Book___ 
Copyright N^. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr. 



LAMB'S ESSAYS 



il 



A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY 



SELECTED AXD ANISTOTATED BY 



ELIZABETH DEERING HANSCOM 



^....Xf^^jhW 



BOSTON 

D LOTHROP COMPANY 

WASHINGTON STREET OPPOSITE BROMFIELD 



(p 



^ 



4-' 



COPYRIGHT, 1891, 
BY 

D. LoTHKop Company. 



TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER 

I DEDICATE THE FIRST FRUITS OF THE EDUCATION I OWE TO 
THEIR LOVE AND CARE. 



PREFACE. 



T 



HE fame of Charles Lamb has increased rather than dimin- 
ished in the fifty-seven years elapsing since his death ; and 
still, as his writings are read and re-read, the personal interest in 
the man grows stronger. Other writers we are content to know 
simply as writers ; Charles Lamb Aye must know as a man. If 
excuse be needed for this volume, it is to be found in this fact. 
It seemed possible to select and unite such essays as were more 
directly autobiographical, adding to these a series of annotations, 
taken largely from the works of Lamb and his contemporaries, 
and thus to throw, if not new, yet stronger, light on the personal- 
ity of the gentle Elia. Such, in brief, is the plan of the book ; 
and if but one mind gains hereby a truer conception of the 
depth of that "well of English undefyled" from which Lamb 
drew so copiously, if but one heart is thrilled with a nobler emo- 
tion by contact with the strong life herein revealed, the writer 
has not failed in her purpose. 

The essays, with one exception, are copied from magazines in 
which they first appeared, and many passages omitted in later 
editions of the essays are replaced. The reasons for omitting 
these personal references are long since passed ; and we cannot 
afford to lose one word that came fresh and forceful from the 
author's teeming brain. "Corrections and reversions," Lamb 
always condemned; and all his admirers prefer to read him at 
first hand, with all his irregularities of spelling and originalities 
of diction. The original essays have been reproduced as nearly 
as possible, with the result, it is hoped, of bringing closer together 

writer and reader. 

E. D. H. 

Boston, March i, 1891. 



CONTENTS, 



LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB ..... 
THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE 
-t? NOTES ON THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER 
TEMPLE . . . . . 

^ ON CHRIST'S HOSPITAL ..... 

NOTES ON Christ's hospital .... 
JLcs^christ's hospital five and thirty years ago 
NOTES ON Christ's hospital five and thirty 

years ago 
my relations . - . 



PAGE. 

I 



7 



/ 



NOTES ON MY RELATIONS 
MACKERY END ' 
NOTES ON MACKERY END 
BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE 



26 
47 

75 
79 

103 
108 
120 
124 

134 
137 



1: 



CONTENTS. 

NOTES ON BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE . . 1 48 

DREAM CHILDREN . . . . . . 150 

NOTES ON DREAM CHILDREN . . . . 1 59 

■i^ RECOLLECTIONS OF THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE . 161 

NOTES ON RECOLLECTIONS OF THE SOUTH SEA 
HOUSE ..... 

< OXFORD IN THE VACATION 

NOTES ON OXFORD IN THE VACATION 

THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 

NOTES ON THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 

OLD CHINA ..... 

NOTES ON OLD CHINA 

DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND READING . 232 

NOTES ON DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND 

READING ...... 244 

JEWS, QUAKERS, SCOTCHMEN, AND OTHER IMPER- 
FECT SYMPATHIES . . . . . 246 

NOTES ' ON JEWS, QUAKERS, SCOTCHMEN, AND 

OTHER IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES . . • 262 

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH . . . 265 

NOTES ON AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH , 268 

A CHARACTER OF THE LATE ELIA . . . 270 

NOTES ON A CHARACTER OF THE LATE ELIA 279 



177 
180 
194 
199 
216 
220 
231 



THE 



LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 



INTRODUCTORY SKETCH. 

The Register of Baptism in the Temple Church 
of London contains the following entry: 



LAMB. 



^Charles, the son of John Lamb and 
Elizabeth, his wife, of Old Crown Office 

-^ Row in the Inner Temple, was born 
10th February, 1775, and baptized 10th 
March following by the Rev. Mr. Jeffs. 



Six children had already been born to the Lamb 
family and christened in the Temple Church, of 
whom but two, John and Mary, survived infancy. 
When Charles was born, John was twelve and 
Mary ten years old; and the baby boy seems to 
have been the special pet and charge of the older 
sister. John Lamb, the father, was friend and ser- 



2 THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 

vitor of Samuel Salt, a bencher of the Inner Tem- 
ple, once a well known lawyer, now a name saved 
from oblivion only by the kindly tribute paid to his 
memory by the son of his old servant. To the 
same pen we owe our only reliable account of John 
Lamb, the elder. As Lovel, of the " Old Bench- 
ers " essay, he is presented to us as he walked in 
life, a genial, honest, sturdy Briton, with a touch of 
eccentricity, and a slight gift of j)oesy. Indeed, he 
published a volume of poems, of which he was ever 
after immeasurably proud ; and it is probable that 
his children inherited from him their power of ver- 
sification, as it is certain that from him .came the 
taint of insanity. 

Of liis pecuniary circumstances at this time we 
know nothing, but they coidd hardly have been 
affluent, and the growing family must have made 
sad drains on the slender salary paid by Mr. Salt, 
Accordingly, when it was time for the boy Charles 
to go to school, his father naturally bethought him- 
self of Christ's Hospital, a school founded and 
endowed for the sons of middle-class gentlemen, 
unable to properly educate their children. Through 
the influence of Mr. Salt — for years the good 
angel of the family — Charles was presented to 
Christ's Hospital on the ninth of October, 1782. 
Here he remained until November 23rd, 1789, at 
which time he had reached the rank of Deputy 



THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 6 

Grecian. Higher than this he was unable to rise, 
owing to an impediment in his speech, rendering 
impracticable any thought of entering the church. 
As only those were admitted to the rank of Grecian 
who were to be sent to the universities in prepara- 
tion for the church, Charles was obliged to leave 
without obtaining the honor of joining the " solemn 
Muftis of the school." 

At Christ's Hospital he received an education 
in those days termed "liberal," but reading strange 
to modern ideas. Of the masters, pupils, instruc- 
tion and discipline of the famous school, during the 
last two decades of the eighteenth century, we are 
fortunate in possessing graphic descriptions by 
Lamb, Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt. Kude and 
almost barbaric as the school seems to us, it was, 
nevertheless, one of the finest of its time, and Lamb 
always considered himself favored in that he had 
been educated in its ancient halls. Here he became 
an excellent Latinist and a fair Grecian, and here 
he spent some of the happiest years of his life. 

To estimate the influence of a school by the eru- 
dition of the masters and the instruction by them 
imparted is to consider but one factor in the prob- 
lem. The average boy learns more from his school- 
mates than from his teachers ; so no account o£ 
Charles Lamb's school life is complete without 
mention of his dearest friends, James Wliite and 



4 THE LIFE OF- CHARLES LAMB. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge : the one, gay, merry, and 
volatile, fit to develop all tlie fun-loving side of 
Lamb's nature ; the other, a poet, scholar, and meta- 
physician in his youth, "the friend of his serious 
thoughts." The intimacies founded in boyhood 
were interrupted only by death. Of White, Lamb 
wrote, " He carried away with him half the fun of 
the world when he died — of my world at least." 
Again, after many years, he wrote of Coleridge, 
" He was my fifty -years-old friend without a dissen- 
tion. I cannot think without an ineffectual refer- 
ence to him." Indeed, with the exception of the 
one dark cloud of his youth, the history of Charles 
Lamb's life is cliiefly a history of his friendships. 
To his friends he showed his rarely beautiful 
nature, offering to them the best of his life ; and 
those who would know the man Charles Lamb, must 
seek him, not in his essays and criticisms, not in 
memoirs and biographies, but in letters written to 
his friends. 

Until he was fifteen, Lamb spent his time 
between the Liner Temple and Christ's Hospital, 
with an occasional trip into Hertfordshire to visit 
his grandmother Field, housekeeper of the great 
house of Gilston, or " Blakesware." The only mod- 
ern elements in his life were the boys playing and 
studying in the ancient halls of Christ's Hospital, 
and even their unavoidable modernity was modified 



THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 5 

into a semblance of antiquity by the mediaeval garb 
and monastic rules of conduct imposed upon them. 
Born in the eighteenth century, he played in the 
quaint old Temple garden, worshipped where the 
Templars had hung their trophies brought home 
from holy wars, wore the dress of the time of 
Edward the Sixth, feasted his fancy in Mr. Salt's 
" closet of good old English reading," studied in the 
" old and awful cloisters " of Christ's Hospital, and, 
in general, lived in a mediaeval world ■ far removed 
from the bustling activity of modern London life. 
Therefore, it is not strange if his writings show 
that his mind received an unalterable bend toward 
the antique. 

We are fortunate in having a pen picture of 
Lamb when a school-boy, drawn by one of his 
friends, Charles Valentine LeGrice, of whom affec- 
tionate mention is made in the second Christ's Hos- 
pital essay. Mr. LeGrice says : " Lamb was an 
amiable, gentle boy, very sensible and keenly 
observing, indulged by his schoolfellows and by 
his master on account of his infirmity of speech. 
His countenance was mild; his complexion clear 
brown, with an expression which might lead you to 
think that he was of Jewish descent. His eyes 
were not each of the same color ; one was hazel, the 
other had specks of gray in the iris, mingled as we 
see red spots in the bloodstone. His step was 



b THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 

plantigrade, which made his walk slow and pecid- 
iar, adding to the staid appearance of his figure." 
Such was Charles Lamb when he left school to 
enter the South Sea House, where his brother had 
been employed for several years. Of his life here 
we know only what he has been pleased to tell us 
in the " Recollections of the South Sea House." 
On the fifth of April, 1792, he obtained an appoint- 
ment in the accountant's office of the great East 
India Company, "the most celebrated commercial 
association of ancient or modern times," says a con- 
temporaneous writer. 

Up to 1775, the Lamb family continued to live 
in the Temple ; but in that year they removed to 
Little Queen Street, Holborn. At this time their 
condition was sad in the extreme. The father was 
almost imbecile, the mother was bed-ridden, the 
older son, a gay young bachelor, did nothing for 
the support of the family, and Charles was for six 
weeks in a mad-house at Hoxton. Mary Lamb was 
straining every nerve to contribute her share toward 
the maintenance of the family, and was worn out 
by needlework all day and the care of her mother 
all night. Moreover, she had suffered from sev- 
eral attacks of insanity, and the malady was likely 
to reappear at any time. So matters went on until 
the twenty-third of September, 1796, when the cri- 
sis came, and her patient, unselfish nature yielded 



THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 7 

to the strain so long endured. Just before dinner 
on that day, Mary, in a sudden fit of insanity, 
seized a knife, j)ursued lier assistant around the 
room, tossed about the dinner knives and forts, and 
finally stabbed her mother. Charles arrived to find 
his mother dead in her bed, his father seriously 
wounded in the head, his old aunt insensible, and 
his sister a raving maniac. At the inquest a ver- 
dict of lunacy was brought in, and Mary was imme- 
diately placed in a lunatic asylum. 

In his own sad and gentle way. Lamb described 
to Coleridge the tragedy and its consequences. No 
version of the story is complete without reference 
to these letters. About a week after his mother's 
death, he wrote : 

" My poor, dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and 
unconscious instrument of the Almighty's judg- 
ment on our house, is restored to her senses — to a 
dreadful sense and recollection of what is past, 
awful to her mind, and impressive (as it must be to 
the end of her life), but tempered with religious 
resignation and the reasonings of a sound judg- 
ment, which, in this early stage, knows how to dis- 
tinguish between a deed committed in a transient 
fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother's 
murder. I have seen her. I found her this morn- 
ing, calm and serene; far, very far from an inde- 
cent, forgetful serenity ; she has a most aif ectionate 



8 THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 

and tender concern for what has happened. In- 
deed, from the beginnmg — frightfid and hopeless 
as her disorder seemed — I had confidence enough 
in her strength of mind and religious principle, 
to look forward to a time when even she might 
recover tranquillity. 

" God be praised, Coleridge ! Wonderful as it is 
to tell, I have never once been otherwise than col- 
lected and calm; even on the dreadful day, and in 
the midst of the terrible scene, I jDreserved a tran- 
quillity which by-standers may have construed into 
indifference — a tranquillity not of despair. Is it 
folly or sin in me to say that it was a religious 
principle that most supported me? I allow much 
to other favorable circumstances. I felt that I had 
something else to do than to regret." 

Mary's recovery was so rapid, and her desire to 

\ leave the asylum was so great, that Charles thought 

' it best to remove her. But John was strenuously 

opposed to this, and it was only after Charles had 

/ • solemnly agreed to provide for her that she was 

removed to lodgings at Hackney, where he spent all 

his Sundays and holidays with her. Those were 

sad days when, after working at his desk all day, 

he went home to play cribbage with his imbecile 

father till late into the night. By and by, the 

old father and aunt died, and with them ceased 

their annuities, so that Lamb was left to his own 



THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 9 

resources, hardly exceeding one hundred pounds a 
year, from which he had to provide for his own 
subsistence and the care of Mary, subject to fre- 
quent attacks of insanity, which required her 
removal to an asylum for weeks at a time. So, 
to Charles Lamb, hardly more than a boy, came 
this great tragedy, blighting forever the dearest 
hopes of his heart and imposing a burden grievous 
to be borne. From the first he never faltered ; on 
the night of his mother's death, when he lay awake, 
"without terrors and without despair," he doubtless 
made a decision concerning the future course of 
his life, a decision from which he never turned 
aside, even to pity himself or bemoan his fate. 
What he promised to do for Mary he lovingly per- 
formed. At twenty-one he took up his life-work; 
at fifty-nine he laid it down, and during all those 
years he had unwaveringly fought a good fight. 
The annals of England are filled with the names of 
her active heroes, those who have done greatly; 
when the list of her passive heroes, those who have 
endured greatly, is made up, honorable mention 
must be accorded to Charles Lamb. For, as in all 
passive heroism, the thing which he did is not to be 
compared, for nobility, with the way in which he 
did it. So strong is the bond uniting children of 
the same parents, that there are, doubtless, many 
brothers capable of renouncing for their sisters their 



10 THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 

own hopes and plans. But Charles Lamb bore his 
cross proudly, as if it were a crown ; he lived all his 
life with a woman liable to seizures of violent 
mania, and he loved her with the whole strength of 
his soul; he comforted, honored, and kept her in 
sickness and in health, forsaking all others he clave 
only unto her, and he did it humbly, gratefully, 
calling himseK unworthy of the j)rotecting care 
which he felt that she exercised over him. His 
sacrifice was whole and complete ; he gave up all 
prospect of an independent life, and all hope of 
a home which sometime he might make for his 
chosen lady, where they might grow old together, 
with children and children's children around them. 
All that is most sweet, most sacred, and most myste- 
rious in a young man's fancy he renounced forever. 
Lamb's earliest writings were love poems, record- 
ing "fancied wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid," 
full of "peace, and meek quietness, and innocent 
loves, and maiden purity," dedicated to " Anna, 
mild-eyed maid." A little collection of these son- 
nets was ready for publication when the dreadful 
tragedy broke its thunder-cloud over the head of 
the youthful poet. How his wooing had prospered 
before this, we do not know, but probably the words 
written so many years after were true, in which he 
tells how, " in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, 
but persisting ever," he courted the shy, sweet 



THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 11 

maiden. Now, however, all was changed. In the 
first sad letter written to Coleridge on the day after 
his mother's d^ath, he says: "Mention nothing of 
poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past 
vanity of that kind "; and again, in reference to the 
publication of the sonnets, he writes : " This is the 
pomp and paraphernalia of parting, with which I 
take my leave of a passion which has reigned so 
royally (so long) within me ; thus, with all its trap- 
pings of laureateship I fling it off, pleased and sat- 
isfied with myself that ,the weakness troubles me no 
longer. I am wedded, Coleridge, to the fortu|ies of 
my sister and poor old father." A little laier in 
the year, he " burned a little journal of my foolish 
passion which I had a long time kept." Even the 
name of his first love is unknown, except as he set 

it forth in the Elian essays, "Alice W n." 

Allusions to her are rare; two or three times in 
the later essays, occasionally in conversation, he 
mentioned her ; but down deep in his heart he bur- 
ied her memory, and he lived on, month after 
month, content; but sometimes, perhaps at the 
sight of a friend's wedded happiness, perhaps at the 
thought of the little children making young again 
his old comrades, the door of his heart would be 
unbarred, and dim through the dust of years would 
look forth the fair face of his first love. 

But, as he once aptly quoted, " the wind is tem- 



12 THE LIFE OF CHAELES LAMB. V 

pered to the sliorn Lambs," and so, little by little, 
tbere came to the brother and sister comfort un- 
thought of in their first dreary hours. If Charles 
Jjamb was deprived of the love of wife and children, 
he was loved by his friends more dearly than falls 
to the fortune of most men ; and if the two lived 
all their lives subject to the fear of the dreadful ill- 
nesses periodically afflicting the sister, they were 
fortunate in this, that never again was the mania 
attended with serious results, and always there were 
premonitory symptoms. At such times, the two 
would set off immediately for Hoxton asylum, and 
one of their friends has told of meeting them, hur- 
rying across the fields, hand in hand, weeping bit- 
terly, and carrying a strait-jacket. With the excep- 
tion of that one attack in the winter of 1795—96, it 
is probable that Lamb was never insane. He may 
have suffered from a brief illness shortly before his 
death, but the evidence on this point is not clear. 

From this time on, the biographer of Lamb has 
few events to cln?onicle. His books and his friends 
made up his life. Lamb's earliest writings show 
few of the characteristics of his later work. His 
humor did not develop early, and the tone of his 
first poems, letters, and criticisms is grave and 
sedate, dealing largely with religious subjects. His 
first published writing appeared in 1797, in a little 
volume of poems to which Lamb, Coleridge, and 



THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 13 

Charles Lloyd contributed. In 1798, lie composed 
Ifiis "miniature romance," "Rosamund Gray," "the 
secret of whose success," says Mr. Ainger, "in the 
face of improbabilities and unrealities of many 
kinds, is one of the curiosities of literature." Lamb 
always had a fondness for the drama, and vainly 
imagined that he could write a play. Accordingly, 
in 1799, he wrote, and in 1802, published a five-act 
tragedy, " John Woodvil," which between the two 
dates had been offered to and flatly rejected by Mr. 
Kemble, then manager of the Drury Lane Theater. 
This play was largely the result of his explorations 
in the field of Elizabethan dramatists, but had ele- 
ments of incongruity and ridiculousness all its own. 
One more rebuff was needed to his dramatic aspira- 
tions and this was speedily furnished when, in 1806, 
his farce, "Mr. H.," was condemned at the same 
theater. This play was a pet with both Lamb and 
his sister, and was brought out with Elliston, the 
best comedian of the day, in its title role; but not 
even Elliston could atone for the slightness of inter- 
est, and the play was hissed by galleries and pit 

alike. 

Meanwhile, Lamb had been turning to good 
account his knowledge of the early English drama, 
and, in 1807, published the "Tales from Shake- 
speare," joint work of Mary and himself, than which 
there has been written "no better introduction to 



14 THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 

the study of Shakespeare," " no better initiation into 
the mind of Shakespeare, and into the subtleties of 
his language and rhythm." As a result of this suc- 
cessful work, he wrote another classic-paraphrase 
for children, "The Adventures of Ulysses." The 
next year saw the publication of his greatest work 
in criticism, " Specimens of English Dramatic Works 
Contemporary with Shakespeare," which not only 
placed the author in the front rank of critics, but 
revived the study of the old English dramatists, 
before this totally unknown to the average readers 
of the early part of the century. In the same year, 
appeared more of the joint work of Charles and 
Mary Lamb, the collection of tales, called "Mrs. 
Leicester's School," and " Poetry for Children," a 
book which, after a short period of popularity, went 
out of print during the author's life, and for fifty 
years was entirely lost sight of. In 1877, a copy 
was sent from Australia to a London publisher, and 
the book was once more brought to light. Some of 
the best work of this part of Lamb's life appeared 
in Z%e Reflector^ edited by Leigh Hmit. Notable 
among his contributions are the papers on "The 
Tragedies of Shakespeare," "The Genius and Char- 
acter of Hogarth," " Burial Societies ; and the Char- 
acter of an Undertaker," and " The Custom of Hiss- 
ing at the Theaters." In 1818, Lamb published 
his first book, entitled "The Works of Charles 



THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 15 

Lamb," in two volumes, and including several 
poems, the best known being "Hester" and "A 
Farewell to Tobacco," his rejected dramas, the tale 
of "Rosamund Grray," and a number of his best 
critical essays. 

In the year 1820, began a new period of Lamb's 
literary career, and during the next six years he 
did the best work of his life, and that by which, 
probably, he will be longest known. In 1820, was 
revived the London Magazine^ a journal devoted to 
criticism and literature, and including among its 
contributors William Hazlitt, Thomas Cariyle, John 
Keats, Thomas de Quincey, Allan Cunningham, 
Thomas Hood, Hartley Coleridge, Bryan Waller 
Procter, Henry Francis Cary, Walter Savage Lan- 
dor, and others hardly less famous. In Procter's 
Memoir of Charles Lamb is an exceedingly inter- 
esting account of the magazine, the contributors, 
and their monthly meetings. Lamb was engaged 
to contribute a series of essays, but no conditions 
seem to have been imposed on him, and he was free 
to ramble where his fancy led. The number of the 
magazine issued in August, 1820, contained an 
essay on " Recollections of the South Sea House," 
signed Elia. In the October issue, following, the 
same signature appeared at the close of a paper on 
" Oxford in the Vacation," and during the five years 
of the magazine's existence, the Elian essays were 



16 THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 

among its favorite features. In 1823, the first 
series was issued in a book containing about twenty- 
five essays, wliich had already won for their author 
an enviable position among men of letters. The 
name Elia (" call him EUia," Lamb wrote to his pub- 
lishers) was borrowed from a fellow-clerk at the 
South Sea House, a young Italian, who died before 
the essays were published. So the name fairly 
devolved to Lamb, who made it a household word in 
English-speaking countries. It would take many 
pages to characterize the style of the Elian essays. 
Procter, Ainger, Hazlitt, and Talfoiird have expend- 
ed their genius on the subject. What can a 
" modern " in a single introductory chapter ? One 
quotation must suffice ; let us take that from 
the words of his friend and companion, "Barry 
Cornwall." 
>^ " Of the Essays of ' Elia ' written originally for 
the London Magazine^ I feel it difficult to speak. 
They are the best among the good — his best. I 
see that they are genial, delicate, terse, full of 
thought and full of humor ; that they are delight- 
fully personal; and when he speaks of himstlf vou 
can not hear too much; that they are not imita- 
tions but adoptions. We encounter his likings and 
fears, his fancies (his nature) in all. The words 
have expanded their meaning, like o]3ened flowers ; 
the goodness of others is heightened by his *.wn 



THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 17 

tenderness ; and what is in nature hard and bad is 
qualified (qualified, not concealed) by the tender 
light of pity, which always intermingles with his 
own vision. Gravity and laughter, fact and fiction 
are heaped together, leavened in each case by char- 
ity and toleration; and all are marked by a wise 
humanity 

" It will be observed by the sagacious student of 
the entire essays, that however quaint or familiar, 
or (rarely, however) sprinkled with classical allu- 
sions, they are never vulgar, nor commonplace, nor 
pedantic. They are 'natural with a self -pleasing 
quaintness.' The phrases are not affected; but are 
derived from our ancestors, now gone to another 
country; they are brought back from the land of 
shadows and made denizens of England, in modern 
times. Lamb's studies were the lives and charac- 
ters of men; his humors and tragic meditations 
were generally dug out of his own heart; there are 
in them earnestness and pity and generosity and 
truth ; and there is not a mean or base thought to 
be found throughout all." 

In 1833, was published a second series of the 
Elian Essays, together with later contributions to 
the New Monthly and the Englishman 8 Magazine. 
Elia, however, was born and died with the London 
Magazine^ and Lamb's later work was of slight 
value compared with that done in his prime. 



18 THE LIFE or CHAKLES LAMB. 

Indeed, though not an old man, he was beginning to 
feel the effects of age. No one can live under such 
constant strain as that imposed on Lamb by the 
frequent illnesses of his beloved sister, without 
growing old beyond his years. The confining 
routine of his office work was also beginning to wear 
on him sadly, and the letters of the years 1823 and 
1824 are full of bitter complaints of his "severe 
step-wife," the " Day-Hag Business," who kept him, 
"not at bed and board, but at desk and board." 
In 1825, came the relief which he so gayly set forth 
in the essay on " The Superannuated Man." But 
this joy did not last long ; the " old familiar faces " 
that had made the pleasure of his rare holidays 
were more deeply missed when the days were all 
holidays, and, as Mr. Ainger well says, " There was 
an element of irritability in Lamb, due to the 
family temperament, which the new life, though he 
could now 'wander at^his own sweet will,' was little 
calculated to appease. The rest of which he 
dreamed, when he retired in the prime of . life from 
professional work, could only mean to such a tem- 
perament as Lamb's restlessness." So we see him 
growing more and more lonely and restless, doing 
little work of real value, writing long letters to his 
friends, re-reading his favorite books, and walking 
miles upon miles after — not with — that sagacious 
and inconsequent dog. Dash, to whose whims — and 



THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 19 

they were many — his master became a slave. One 
by one his oldest and dearest friends dropped away. 
Years before, he had written, as if in anticipation 
of this time : 

" For some they have died, and some they have left me, 
And some are taken from me; all are departed; 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." 

In July, 1834, Coleridge died; it was as if half 
of Lamb's life had been suddenly taken away. 
Unceasingly he mourned his friend, more to him 
than brother. He survived him but five months. 
Walking, one day, on London Road, he stumbled 
against a stone and fell, slightly bruising his face. 
The wound was healing when erysipelas set in, and 
he sank quickly but without pain. On the 27th of 
December he died. " To him who never gave pain 
to a human being, whose genius yielded nothing 
but instruction and delight was awarded a calm and 
easy death." About a fortnight before, he had 
pointed out to Mary where he wished to be buried ; 
and there in the churchyard at Edmonton, his 
friends laid his tired body to rest. Not for twelve 
years was the grave opened to receive the body of 
Mary Lamb. During those years her attacks of 
illness became more frequent, and her mind was 
much weakened, but to the end she retained her 
sweet and gentle disposition. 



20 THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 

On tlie 20tli of May, 1847, she was at last 
released from her suffering; and the two who in 
their lives were so lovely in death were not 
divided. 

In the days of their prosperity, Charles and 
Mary Lamb were pre-eminently social beings ; and 
for many years they were surrounded by a choice 
circle of friends, without a reference to whom no 
sketch of their lives would be complete. The 
letters, diaries, and biographies of many of the men 
of letters of this period abound in references to 
evenings spent with the Lambs. " When you went 
to Lamb's rooms on the Wednesday evenings (his 
'At Home')," writes Procter, "you generally found 
the card-table spread out. Lamb himself one of the 
players. On the corner of the table was a snuff- 
box ; and the game was enlivened by sundry ejacu- 
lations and pungent questions which kept alive the 

wits of the party present The supjDer 

of cold meat, on these occasions, was always on the 
side table; not very formal, as may be imagined; 
and every one might rise, when it suited him, and 
cut a slice or take a glass of porter, without reflect- 
ing on the abstinence of the rest of the company." 
At the head of the whist-table sat Lamb, " with a 
sort of Quaker primness," "the gentleness of his 
melancholy smile half lost in his intentness on the 
game." Talford has thus described him : " A light 



THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 21 

frame, so fragile that it seemed as if a breath 
would overthrow it, clad in clerklike black, was 
'surmounted by a head of form and expression the 
most noble and sweet. His black hair curled 
crisply about an expanded forehead; his eyes, 
softly brown, twinkled with varying expression, 
though the prevalent feeling was sad ; and the nose, 
slightly curved and delicately carved at the nostril, 
with the lower outline of the face regularly oval, 
completed a head which was finely placed on the 
shoulders, and gave importance and even dignity to 
a diminutive and shadowy stem." Here, in the bare 
and shabby room, around this quaint figure, gath- 
ered a host of friends. Here Coleridge expanded 
his transcendental imageries to a wondering audi- 
ence ; here Wordsworth met his enthusiastic admir- 
ers ; here Hazlitt uttered " fine criticism with strug- 
gling emphasis " ; here Goodwin propounded his 
daring schemes ; here Liston and Kemble and Miss 
Kelly, the theatrical pets of the town, came for a 
quiet chat after the play was over; here young 
aspirants for fame met the literary lions, or stayed 
behind to bashfully read their maiden efforts to the 
kindly critics of the house. Among them all, 
"Miss Lamb moves gently about to see that each 
modest stranger is duly served; turning now and 
then an anxious, loving eye on Charles, which is 
softened into a half-humorous expression of resig- 



22 THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 

nation to inevitable fate, as lie mixes his second 
tmnbler." 

It cannot be denied that on these and similar 
occasions, Mary Lamb had cause for anxious 
thoughts. Too many times as we read the corre- 
spondence, we find reference to those unfortunate 
nights when Charles came home "very smoky and 
drinky." Talfourd and Procter have ineffectually 
tried to explain these references. Nevertheless, 
they are facts which must be recorded — sad and 
dreary facts, which we can only pass over silently 
and sorrowfully. More easy of excuse and expla- 
nation are Lamb's eccentricities, his sudden varia- 
tions of temper, his mercurial gayety, his profound 
depression, his many incongruities of mind and 
manner, whimsically set forth in his " Character of 
the Late Elia." One could hardly expect an ordi- 
nary character as the result of an inheritance 
streaked with insanity, a youth blighted by fearful 
tragedy, and a life spent on the verge of madness. 
The wonder is, that Lamb so lightly escaped the 
hereditary curse. Talfourd says, "Perhaps the 
true cause of this exemption .... will be 
found in the sudden claim made on his moral and 
intellectual nature by a terrible exigency, .and by 
his generous answer to that claim ; so that a life of 
self-sacrifice was rewarded by the preservation of 
unclouded reason." 



THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 23 

Probably the religious side of Lamb's life is the 
one least understood. Those who know him only 
as the writer of hon mots^ the genial essayist, the 
jovial carouser, know but the lesser portion of the 
man. His first letters breath a spirit of intense 
religious thought and activity; later, when his 
youth was passed and with it the desire to put in 
words his deepest feelings, he became a man, " with 
no religion to speak of." But down under the 
surface of his nature, " the stream glided still, the 
undercurrent of thought, sometimes breaking out in 
sallies which strangers did not understand, but 
always feeding and nourishing the most exquisite 
sweetness of disposition, and the most unobtrusive 
proofs of self-denying love." " Religion in him 
never died, but became a habit — a habit of endur- 
ing hardness, and cleaving to the steadfast perform- 
ance of duty in face of the strongest allurements to 
the pleasanter and easier course." 

So, once more, the story of Charles Lamb's life 
has been told — albeit haltingly and imperfectly. 
Of all the tributes to his momery there is none 
more true, more tender, or more touching than that 
of our own countryman, George William Curtis. 
I take the liberty to close my trifling sketch with 
his living words : 

"There is nothing to be added to the majesty 
and dignity of that life, and there is nothing that 



24 THE LIFE OF CHARLES LAMB. 

can be taken away. Lamb was not a saint. He 
drank sometimes to excess. He, also, smoked 
tobacco. But if ever a good, great man walked 
tlie earth — good and great in the profoundest and 
noblest sense — full of that simple human charity 
and utter renunciation of self which is the ful- 
filling of the highest law and the holiest instinct, 
it was that man with a face of ' quivering sweetness,' 
' nervous, tremulous, . . . . so slight of frame 
that he looked only fit for the most placid fortune ' ; 
who conquered poverty and hereditary madness, and 
won an imperishable name in English literature, 
and a sacred place in every generous heart — all in 
silence, and with a smile." 



r\E QUINCEY has observed that one chief pleasure we derive 
from Lamb's writing is due to a secret satisfaction in feel- 
ing that his admirers must always of necessity be a select few. 
There is an unpleasantly cynical flavor about the remark, but at 
the same time one understands to what it points. Thoroughly 
to understand and enjoy Lamb, one must come to entertain a 
feeling toward him almost like personal affection, and such a 
circle of intimates will always be small. It is necessary to come 
to the study of his writings in entire trustfulness, and having 

first cast away all prejudice It is in vain to attempt 

to convey an idea of the impression left by Lamb's style. One 
might as well seek to account for the perfume of lavender, or the 
flavor of quince. It is in truth an essence, prepared from flowers 
and herbs gathered in fields where the ordinary reader does not 
often range. And the nature of the writer — the alembic in 
which these various simples were distilled — was as rare for 
sweetness and purity as the best of those enshrined in the old 
folios, his "midnight darlings." If he had by nature the delicate 
grace of Marvell, and the quaint fancy of Quarles, he also shared 
the chivalry of Sidney, and could lay on himself "the lowliest 
duties" in the spirit of his best-beloved of all, John Milton. 
It is the man, Charles Lamb, that constitutes the enduring 
charm of his written words. — Alfred Ainger. 



26 OLD BENCHERS. 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER 

TEMPLE. 

\London Magazine, September, 1821.] 

On the soutli side of Fleet Street, near to where 
it adjoins Temple Bar, lies the Inner Temple. It 
extends southward to the Thames, and contains 
long ranges of melancholy buildings, in which 
lawyers (those reputed birds of prey) and their 
followers congregate. It is a district very memo- 
rable. About seven hundred years ago, it v/as the 
abiding place of the Knights Templars ; who 
erected there a church, which still uplifts its round 
tower (its sole relic), for the wonder of modern 
times. Fifty years since, I remember, you entered 
the precinct through a lowering archway that 
opened into a gloomy passage ; Inner Temple Lane. 
On the east side rose the church ; and on the west 
was a dark line of chambers, since pulled down and 
rebuilt, and now called Johnson's Buildings. At 



OT 



OLD BENCHERS. ^Si 

some distance westward was an open court, in 
which was a sun dial ! and, in the midst, a solitary 
fountain, that sent its silvery voice into the air 
above ; the murmur of which, descending, seemed 
to render the place more lonely. Midway, between 
the Inner Temple Lane and the Thames was, and I 
believe still is, a range of substantial chambers 
(overlooking the gardens and the busy river), called 
Crown Office Row. 

— Bryan Waller Procter (1866) 



28 OLD BENCHERS. 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER 

TEMPLE. 

I WAS born, and passed the first seven years of 
my life, in tlie Temple. Its cliurcli, its halls, its 
gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said, 
for in those young years, what was this king of 
rivers to me, but a stream that watered our pleasant 
places? — these are of my oldest recollections. I 
repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more fre- 
quently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of 
Spenser, where he speaks of this spot : 

There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, 
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride, 
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, 
There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide. 
Till they decayd through pride. 

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metrop- 
olis. What a transition for a countryman visiting 
London for the first time — the passing from the 
crowded Strand or Fleet-street, by unexpected 



OLD BENCHERS. 29 

avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its 
classic green recesses! What a cheerful, liberal 
look hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, 
overlooks the greater garden : that goodly pile 

Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight, 

confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, 
more fantastically shrouded one, named of Har- 
court, with the cheerful Crown-office Eow (place of 
my kindly engendure), right opposite the stately 
stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet 
scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just 
weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! A man 
would give something to have been born in such 
places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine 
Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I 
have made to rise and fall, how many times ! to the 
astoundment of the young urchins, my contempo- 
raries, who, not being able to guess at its recondite 
machinery, were almost tempted to hail the won- 
drous work as magic! What an antique air had 
the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral 
inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which 
they measured, and to take their revelations of its 
flight immediately from heaven, holding corre- 
spondence with the fountain of light ! How would 
the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by 
the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, 



30 OLD BENCHERS. 

never catclied, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the 
first arrests of sleep ! » 

Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand 

Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! 

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous 
embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn 
dulness of communication, compared with the simple 
altar-like structure, and silent heart-language of the 
old dial ! It stood as the garden god of Christian 
gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? 
If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate 
inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have 
pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate 
labours, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of 
temperance, and good hours. It was the primitive 
clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could 
scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the 
measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to 
spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver 
warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to 
fold by. The shepherd " carved it out quaintly in 
the sun " ; and, turning philosopher by the very 
occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching 
than tombstones. It was a pretty device of the 
gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of 
artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and 
flowdrs. I must quote his verses a little higher up, 



OLD BENCHERS. 31 

for they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a 
witty delicacy. They will not come in awkwardly, 
I hope, in a talk of fountains and sun-dials. He is 
speaking of sweet garden scenes. 

What wondrous life is this I lead ! 
Ripe apples drop about my head. 
The luscious clusters of the vine 
Upon my mouth do crush their wine. 
The nectarine, and curious peach, 
Into my hands themselves do reach. 
Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 
Insnar'd with flowers, I fall on grass. 
Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less 
Withdraws into its happiness. 
The mind, that ocean, where each kind 
Does straight its own resemblance find; 
Yet it creates, transcending these, 
Far other worlds, and other seas; 
Annihilating all that's made 
To a green thought in a green shade. 
Here at the fountain's sliding foot, 
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, 
Casting the body's vest aside, 
My soul into the boughs does glide : 
There, like a bird, it sits and sings. 
Then whets and claps its silver wings ; 
And, till prepared for longer flight, 
Waves in its plumes the various light. 
How well the skilful gardener drew, 
Of flowers and herbs, this dial new ! 
Where, from above, the milder sun 
Does through a fragrant zodiac run : 
And, as it works, the industrious bee 
Computes its time as well as we. 



32 OLD BENCHERS. 

How could such sweet and wholesome hours . 
Be reckon'd, but with herbs and flowers ?* 

The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in 
like manner, fast vanishing. Most of them are 
dried up, or bricked over. Yet, where one is left, 
as in that little green nook behind the South Sea 
House, what a freshness it gives to the dreary pile ! 
Four little winged marble boys used to play their 
virgin fancies, spouting out ever fresh streams from 
their innocent-wanton lips, in the square of Lin- 
coln's-inn, when I was no bigger than they were 
figured. They are gone, and the spring choked up. 
The fashion, they tell me, is gone by, and these 
things are esteemed childish. Why not then 
gratify children, by letting them stand? Lawyers, 
I suppose, were children once. They are awaken- 
ing images to them at least. Why must every- 
thing smack of man, and mannish? Is the w^orld 
all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or, is there 
not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best some 
of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest 
enchantments? The figures were grotesque. Are 
the stiff-wigged living figures, that still flitter and 
chatter about that area, less gothic in appearance ? 
or is the splutter of their hot rhetoric one half so 
refreshing and innocent, as the little cool playful 
streams those exploded cherubs uttered ? 

* From a copy of verses entitled, The Garden. 



OLD BENCHERS. 33 

Thej have lately gothicized the entrance to the 
Inner Temple-hall, and the library front, to assim- 
ilate them, I suppose, to the body of the hall, which 
they do not at all resemble. What is become of 
the winged horse that stood over the former? a 
stately arms ! and who has removed those frescoes 
of the Virtues, which Italianized the end of the 
Paper-buildings ? — my first hint of allegory ! They 
must account to me for these things, which I miss 
so greatly. 

The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call 
the parade ; but the traces are passed away of the 
footsteps which made its pavement awful ! It is be- 
come common and profane. The old benchers had it 
almost sacred to themselves, in the forepart of the 
day at least. They might not be sided or jostled. 
Their air and dress asserted the parade. You left 
wide spaces betwixt you, when you passed them. 
We walk on even ternis with their successors. The 

roguish eye of J —11, ever ready to be delivered 

of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie a repartee 
with it. But what insolent familiar durst have 
mated Thomas Coventry? — whose person was a 
q^uadrate,, his step massy and elephantine, his face 
square as the lion's, his gait peremptory and path- 
keeping, indivertible from liis way as a moving 
column, the scarecrow of his inferiors, the brow- 
beater of equals and superiors, who made a solitude 



34 OLD BENCHERS. 

of children wherever he came, for they fled his 
insufferable presence, as they would have shunned 
an Elisha bear. His growl was as thunder in their 
ears, whether he spake to them in mirth or in 
rebuke, his invitatory notes being, indeed, of all, the 
most repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, aggra- 
vating the natural terrors of his speech, broke from 
each majestic nostril, darkening the air. He took 
it, not by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving 
for it, under the mighty flaps of his old-fashioned 
waistcoat pocket; his waistcoat red and angry, his 
coat dark rappee, tinctured by dye original, and by 
adjuncts, with buttons of obsolete gold. And so he 
paced the terrace. 

By his side a milder form was sometimes to be 
seen ; the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. They 
were coevals, and had nothing but that and their 
benchership in common. In politics Salt was a 
Whig, and Coventry a staunch Tory. Many a sar- 
castic growl did the latter cast out, for Coventry 
had a rough spinous humour, at the political con- 
federates of his associate, which rebounded from 
the gentle bosom of the latter like cannon-balls 
from wool. You could not ruffle Samuel Salt. 

S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, 
and of excellent discernment in the chamber prac- 
tice of the law. I suspect his knowledge did not 
amount to much. When a case of difficult dispo- 



OLD BENCHERS. 



8e5 



sition of money, testamentary or otherwise, came 
before him, he ordinarily handed it over with a few 
instructions to his man Lovel, who was a quick lit- 
tle fellow, and would despatch it out of hand by the 
light of natural understanding, of which he had an 
uncommon share. It was incredible what repute 
for talents S. enjoyed by the mere trick of gravity. 
He was a shy man ; a child might pose him in a 
minute — indolent and procrastinating to the last 
degree. Yet men would give him credit for vast 
application in spite of himself. He was not to be 
trusted with himself with impunity. He never 
dressed for a dinner party but he forgot his sword 

they wore swords then — or some other necessary 

part of his equipage. Lovel had his eye upon him 
on all these occasions, and ordinarily gave him his 
cue. If there was anything which he could speak 
unseasonably, he was sure to do it. — He was to 
dine at a relative's of the unfortunate Miss Blandy 
on the day of her execution ; — and L. who had a 
wary foresight of his probable hallucinations, before 
he set out, schooled him with great anxiety not in 
any possible manner to allude to her story that day. 
S. promised faithfully to observe the injunction. 
He had not been seated in the parlour, where the 
company was expecting the dinner summons, four 
minutes, when, a pause in the conversation ensu- 
ing, he got up, looked out of window, and pulling 



36 OLD BENCHERS. 

down his ruffles — an ordinary motion with him — 
observed, " it was a gloomy day," and added, " Miss 
Blandy must be hanged by this time, I suppose." 
Instances of this sort were perpetual. Yet S. was 
thought by some of the greatest men of his time a 
fit person to be consulted, not alone in matters per- 
taining to the law, but in the ordinary niceties and 
embarrassments of conduct — from force of manner 
entirely. He never laughed. He had the same 
good fortune among the female world, was a known 
toast with the ladies, and one or two are said to 
have died for love of him — I suppose, because he 
never trifled or talked gallantry with them, or paid 
them, indeed, hardly common attentions. He had 
a fine face and person, but wanted, methought, the 
spirit that should have shown them off with advant- 
age to the women. His eye lacked lustre. Lady 
Mary Wortley Montague was an exception to her 
sex : she says, in one of her letters, " I wonder what 
the women see in S. I do not think him by any 
means handsome. To me he appears an extraor- 
dinary dull fellow and to want common sense. Yet 
the fools are all sighing for him." Not so, thought 

Susan P ; who, at the advanced age of sixty, 

was seen, in the cold evening time, unaccompanied, 

wetting the pavement of B d Row, with tears 

that fell in drops which might be heard, because 
her friend had died that day — he, whom she had 



OLD BENCHERS. 37 

pursued with a hopeless passion for the last forty 
years — a passion, which years could not extinguish 
or abate, nor the long resolved, yet gently enforced, 
puttings off of unrelenting bachelorhood dissuade 

from its cherished purpose. Mild Susan P , 

thou hast now thy friend in heaven I 

Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble 
family of that name. He passed his youth in con- 
tracted circumstances, which gave him early those 
parsimonious habits which in after-life never for- 
sook him; so that, with one windfall or another, 
about the time I knew him, he was master of four 
or five hundred thousand ]30unds ; nor did he look, 
or walk, worth a moidore less. He lived in i^ 
gloomy house opposite the pump in Serjeant's-inn, 
Meet-street. J., the counsel, is doing self-imposed 
penance in it, for what reason I divine not, at 
this day. C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, 
where he seldom spent above a day or two at a time 
in the summer ; but preferred, during the hot 
months, standing at his window in this damj), close, 
well-like mansion, to watch, as he said, "the maids 
drawing water all day long." I suspect he had his 
within-door reasons for the preference. Hio currus 
et arma fuere. He might think his treasures more 
safe. His house had the aspect of a strong box. 
C. was a close hunks — a hoarder rather than a 
miser — or, if a miser, none of the mad Elwes 



38 OLD BENCHERS. 

breed, who tave brought discredit upon a character, 
which cannot exist without certain admirable points 
of steadmess and unity of purpose. One may hate 
a true miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise 
him. By taking care of the pence, he is often 
enabled to part with the pounds, upon a scale that 
leaves us careless generous fellows halting at an 
immeasurable distance behind. C. gave away 
30,000 1. at once in his life-time to a blind charity. 
His house-keeping was severely looked after, but he 
kept the table of a gentleman. He woidd know 
who came in and who went out of his house, but 
his kitchen chimney was never suffered to freeze. 
^ Salt was his opposite in this, as in all — never 
knew what he was worth in the world ; and having 
but a competency for his rank, which his indolent 
habits were little calculated to improve, might have 
suffered severely if he had not had honest people 
about him. Lovel took care of everything. He 
was at once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, 
his friend, his " flapper," his guide, stop-watch, audi- 
tor, treasurer. He did nothing without consulting 
Lovel, or failed in anything without expecting and 
fearing his admonishing. He put himself almost 
too much in his hands, had they not been the 
purest in the world. He resigned his title almost 
to respect as a master, if L. could ever have forgot- 
ten for a moment that he was a servant. 



OLD BENCHERS. 39 

I knew tMs Lovel. He was a man of an incor- 
rigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal, 
and "would strike." In the cause of the oppressed 
he never considered inequalities, or calculated the 
number of his opponents. He once wrested a 
sword out of the hand of a man of quality that had 
drawn upon him ; and pommelled him severely with 
the hilt of it. The swordsman had offered insult 
to a female — an occasion upon which no odds 
against him could have prevented the interference 
of Lovel. He would stand next day bare-headed 
to the same person^ modestly to excuse his mterfer- 
ence. For L. never forgot rank, where something 
better was not concerned. He pleaded the cause of 
a delinquent in the treasury of the Temple so 
effectually with S. the then treasurer — that the 
man was allowed to keep his place. L. had the 
offer to succeed him. It had been a lucrative pro- 
motion. But L. chose to forego the advantage 
because the man had a wife and family. L. was 
the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face as 
gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to 
resemble (I have a portrait of him which confirms 
it), possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry — 
next to Swift and Prior — moulded heads in clay 
or plaister of Paris to admiration, by the dint of 
natural genius merely; turned cribbage boards, 
and such small cabinet toys, to perfection; took 



40 OLD BENCHERS. 

a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility; 
made punch better than any man of his degree in 
England ; had the merriest quips and conceits, and 
was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inven- 
tions as you could desire. He was a brother of the 
angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, 
honest companion as Mr. Isaac Walton would have 
chosen to go a fishing with. I saw him in his old 
age and the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in 
the last sad stage of human weakness — "a rem- 
nant most forlorn of what he was," — yet even then 
his eye would light up upon the mention of his 
favourite Garrick. He was greatest, he 'would say, 
in Bayes — " was upon the stage nearly throughout 
the whole performance, and as busy as a bee." At 
intervals too, he would speak of his former life, and 
how he came up a little boy from Lincoln to go to 
service, and how his mother cried at parting with 
him, and how he returned after some few years' 
absence in his smart new livery to see her, and she 
blessed herself at the change, and could hardly be 
brought to believe that it was "her own bairn." 
And then, the excitement subsiding, he would weep, 
till I have wished that sad second-childhood might 
have a mother still to lay its head upon her lap. 
But the common mother of us all in no long time 
after received him gently into hers. 

With Coventry, and with Salt, in their walks 



OLD BENCHERS. 41 

upon the terrace, most commonly Peter Pierson 
would join to make up a third. They did not walk 
linked arm in arm in those days — " as now our 
stout triumvirs sweep the streets," — but generally 
with both hands folded behind them for state, or 
with one at least behind, the other carrying a cane. 
P. was a benevolent, but not a prepossessing man. 
He had that in his face which you could not term 
unhappiness ; it rather implied an incapacity of 
being happy. His cheeks were colourless, even to 
whiteness. His look was uninviting, resembling 
(but without his sourness) that of our great philan- 
thropist. I know that he did good acts, but I 
could never make out what he was. Contemporary 
with these, but subordinate, was Daines Barring- 
ton — another oddity — he walked burly and square 
— in imitation, I think, of Coventry — howbeit he 
attained not to the dignity of his prototjrpe. Never- 
theless, he did pretty well, upon the strength of 
being a tolerable antiquarian, and having a brother 
a bishop. When the account of his year's treas- 
urership came to be audited, the following singular 
charge was unanimously disallowed by the bench: 
" Item, disbursed Mr. Allen the gardener, twenty 
shillings, for stuff to poison the sparrows, by my 
orders." Next to him was old Barton — a jolly 
negation, who took upon him the ordering of the 
bills of fare for the parliament chamber, where 



42 OLD BENCHEES. 

the bencliers dine — answering to the combination 
rooms at college — mucli to tlie easement of his 
less epicurean brethren. I know nothing more of 
him. — Then Read, and Twopenny — Read, good- 
humoured and personable — Twopenny, good-hu- 
moured, but thin, and felicitous in jests upon his 
own figure. If T. was thin, Wharry was attenu- 
ated and fleeting. Many must remember him (for 
he was rather of later date) and his singular gait, 
which was performed by three steps and a jump 
regularly succeeding. The steps were little efforts, 
like that of a child beginning to walk; the jump 
com23aratively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. 
Where he learned this figure, or what occasioned 
it, I could never discover. It was neither graceful 
in itself, nor seemed to answer the purpose any 
better than common walking. The extreme tenuity 
of his frame, I suspect, set him upon it. It was a 
trial of poising. Twopenny would often rally him 
uj)on his leanness, and hail him as Brother Lusty; 
but ,W. had no relish of a joke. His features 
were spiteful. I have heard that he would pinch 
his cat's ears extremely, when any thing had 
offended him. Jackson — the omniscient Jackson 
he was called — was of this period. He had the 
reputation of possessing more multifarious knowl- 
edge than any man of his time. He was the Friar 
Bacon of the less literate portion of the Temple. 



OLD BENCHERS. 43 

I remember a pleasant passage, of tlie cook apply- 
ing to him, witli much formality of apology, for 
instructions how to write down edge bone of beef 
in his bill of commons. He was supposed to know, 
if any man in the world did. He decided the 
orthography to be — as I have given it — fortify- 
ing his authority with such anatomical reasons as 
dismissed the manciple (for the time) learned and 
happy. Some do spell it yet perversely, aitch bone, 
from a fanciful resemblance between its shape, and 
that of the aspirate so denominated. I had almost 
forgotten Mingay with the iron hand — but he was 
somewhat later. He had lost his right hand by 
some accident, and supplied it with a grappling 
hook, which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. 
I detected the substitute, before I was old enoup-h 
to reason whether it were artificial or not. I 
remember the astonishment it raised in me. He 
was a blustering, loud-talking person ; and I recon- 
ciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an emblem of 
power — somewhat like the horns in the forehead 
of Michael Angelo's Moses. Baron Maseres, who 
walks (or did till very lately) in the costume of the 
reign of George the Second, closes my imperfect 
recollections of the old benchers of the Inner 
Temple. 

Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled ? Or, if the 
like of you exist, why exist they no more for me? 



44 OLD BENCHERS. 

Ye inexplicable, half-understood appearances, why 
comes in reason to tear away the preternatural 
mist, bright or gloomy, that enshrouded you? 
Why make ye so sorry a figure in my relation, who 
made up to me — to my childish eyes — the myth- 
ology of the Temple? In those days I saw Gods, 
as " old men covered with a mantle," walking upon 
the earth. — Let the dreams of classic idolatry 
perish, — extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery 
of legendary fabling, — in the heart of childhood, 
there will, for ever, spring up a well of innocent or 
wholesome superstition — the seeds of exaggeration 
will be busy there, and vital — from every-day 
forms educing the unknown and the uncommon. 
In that little Goshen there will be light, when the 
grown world flounders about in the darkness of 
sense and materiality. While childhood, and while 
dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagina- 
tion shall not have spread her holy wings totally to 
fly the earth. 

P. S. I have done injustice to the soft shade 
of Samuel Salt. See what it is to trust to imper- 
fect memory, and the erring notices of childhood ! 
Yet I protest I always thought that he had been a 
bachelor ! This gentleman, R. N., informs me, 
married young, and losing his lady in child-bed 
within the first year of their union, fell into a deep 
melancholy, from the effects of which, probably, he 



OLD BENCHERS. ^5 



never thorouglily recovered. In what a new light 
does this place his rejection (O call it by a gentler 

name!) of mild Susan P , unravellmg mto 

beauty certain peculiarities of tins very shy and 
retiring character! -Henceforth let no one receive 
the narratives of Elia for true records ! They are, 
in truth, but shadows of fact - verisimilitudes, not 
verities -or sitting but upon the remote edges and 
outskirts of history. He is no such honest croni- 
cler as K. N., and would have done better perhaps 
to have consulted that gentleman, before he sent 
these incondite reminiscences to press. But the 
worthy sub-treasurer — who respects his old and his 
new masters — would but have been puzzled at the 
indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots 
not, peradventure, of the license which Magaz^nes 
have arrived at in this personal age, or hardly 
dreams of their existence beyond the Gentleman s 
_-Tiis furthest monthly excursions in this nature 
kiving been long confined to the holy ground of 
honest Urhan's obituary. May it be long before 
his own name shall help to swell those columns ot 
unenvied flattery ! — Meantime, O ye new Benchers 
of the Inner Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is 
himself the kindliest of human creatures. Should 
infirmities over-take him — he is yet in green 
and vigorous senility — make allowances for them, 
remembering that "ye yourselves are old." bo 



46 OLD BENCHERS. 

may tlie winged horse, your ancient badge and 
cognisance, still flourisli! so may future Hookers 
and Seldens illustrate your church and chambers ! 
so may the sparrows, in default of more melodious 
quiristers, unpoisoned hop about your walks ! so 
may the fresh-coloured and cleanly nursery maid, 
who, by leave, airs her playful charge in your 
stately gardens, drop her prettiest blushing curtsey 
as ye pass, reductive of juvenescent emotion ! so 
may the younkers of this generation eye you, pac- 
ing your stately terrace, with the same superstitious 
veneration, with which the child Elia gazed on the 
old worthies that solemnized the parade before ye I 



OLD BENCHERS. 47 



THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER 

TEMPLE. 

PAGE 

29 — Crowrv-office Row. Since, partly rebuilt; 
but No. 2, Lamb's house, stands now nearly as it 
did then. 

32 — The child's heart. Henry Crabb Robinson, 
in his diary, wrote of Lamb : " How Lamb con- 
firms the remark of the childlikeness of genius ! " 

33 — Inner Temple-hall. This old hall, of James 
I.'s time was replaced in 1870 by a handsome 
Gothic hall, designed by Sidney Smirke. 

33 — J II, Joseph Jekyll, M. P. A Master 

in Chancery, distinguished for his wit; solicitor- 
general to the Prince of Wales, in 1805. 

34 — Samuel Salt. For many years the friend 
and patron of the Lamb family. It was into his 
" spacious closet of good old English reading " that 
Charles and Mary Lamb were "tumbled," and in 
which they "browsed at will." It was through his 
influence that Charles Lamb was presented to 
Christ's Hospital, and Mr. Procter thinks it proba- 
ble that the same kindly friend was efficient in pro- 



48 OLD BENCHERS. 

curing Lamb's appointment at the East India 
House. 

35 — His man Lovel. Under this name, Lamb 
has given us a portrait of his father, so clear and 
delicate, so distinct and softly tinted, as to remind 
us of an exquisite bit of ivory miniature-painting. 

36 — Susan P . "Susan Pierson." — Key to 

Elia. 

36 — B d Row. Bedford Row. 

37 — Mad Elwes breed. John Meggot Elwes, a 
famous English miser, who lived in the great- 
est destitution, and at his death, in 1789, left 
£500,000. 

39 — The liveliest little fellow breathing. In 
a poem, "Written on the Day of my Aunt's 
Funeral," Lamb thus describes his father: 



" A merrier man, 
A man more apt to frame matter for mirth, 
Mad jokes, and antics for a Christmas eve; 
Making life social, and the laggard time 
To move on nimbly, never yet did cheer 
The little circle of domestic friends." 



39 — A fine turn for humorous poetry. John 
Lamb published a volume of poems, of which the 
most were extraordinary and eccentric productions. 

40 His old age. In the poem quoted above, 

occur these lines, also referring to John Lamb : 



OLD BENCHERS. 49 

"A palsy-smitten, childish, old, old man, 
A semblance most forlorn of what he was." 

44 — That little Goshen. A favorite reference of 
Lamb's to the land of Goslien, which, because of 
the children of Israel, was exempted from the 
plagues of Egypt. 

44 — R. N. Randal Norris, who held an office 
at Christ's Hospital, when Charles Lamb was a 
pupil there, and afterward became sub-treasurer of 
the Inner Temple. His last hours are commemo- 
rated in the Elian essay, " A Death Bed," an essay 
very slightly altered from a letter to Henry Crabb 
Robinson, in which Lamb writes : " He was my 
friend and my father's friend all the life I can 
remember. I seem to have made foolish friend- 
ships ever since. Those are friendships which 
ontKve a second generation. Old as I am waxing, 
in his eyes I was still the child he first knew me. 
To the last he called me Charley. I have none to 
call me Charley now." 



50 Christ's hospital. 



ON CHEIST'S HOSPITAL, AND THE CHAE- 

ACTEE OE THE CHEIST'S 

HOSPITAL BOYS. 

[Gentleman'' s Magazme, June, 1813] 

Perhaps there is not a foundation in the country 
so truly English, taking that word to mean what 
Englishmen wish it to mean; — something solid, 
unpretending, of good character, and free to all. 
More boys are to be found in it, who issue from a 
greater variety of ranks, than in any other school 
in the kingdoms and as it is the most various, so 
it is the largest, of all the free schools .... 
The boys themselves (at least it was so in my 
time) had no sort of feeling of the difference of one 
another's ranks out of doors. The cleverest boy 
was the noblest, let his father be who he might. 
Christ-Hospital is a nursery of tradesmen, of mer- 
chants, of naval officers, of scholars ; it has pro- 
duced some of the greatest ornaments of their 
time 



Christ's hospitat. 51 

Christ-Hospital, I believe, towards tlie close of 
the last century, and the beginning of the present, 
sent out more living writers, in its proportion, than 
any other school. 

-^ Leigh Hunt (1850.) 



52 Christ's hospital. 



ON CHRIST'S HOSPITAL, AND THE CHAR- 
ACTER OF THE CHRIST'S 
HOSPITAL BOYS. 

A GREAT deal lias been said about the Governors 
of this Hospital abusing their right of presentation, 
by presenting the children of opulent parents to 
the Institution. This may have been the case in 
an instance or two ; and what wonder, in an 
establishment consisting, in town and country, of 
upwards of a thousand boys ! But I believe there 
is no great danger of an abuse of this sort ever 
becoming very general. There is an old quality in 
human nature,, which will perpetually present an 
adequate preventive to this evil. While the coarse 
blue coat and the yellow hose shall continue to be 
the costume of this school, (and never may modern 
refinement innovate upon the venerable fashion!) 
the sons of the Aristocracy of this country, cleric 
or laic, will not often be obtruded upon this 
seminary. 



Christ's hospital. 53 

I own, 1 wish there was more room for such 
complanits. I cannot but think that a sprinlding 
of the sons of respectable parents among them has 
an admirable tendency to liberalize the whole mass ; 
and that to the great proportion of Clergymen's 
children in particular which are to be found among 
them it is owing, that the foundation has not long 
since degenerated into a mere Charity-school, as it 
must do, upon the plan so hotly recommended by 
some reformists, of recruiting its ranks from the 
offspring of none but the very lowest of the people. 

I am not learned enough in the history of the 
Hospital to say by what steps it may have departed 
from the letter of its original charter; but believ- 
ing it, as it is at present constituted, to be a great 
practical benefit, I am not anxious to revert to first 
principles, to overturn a positive good, under j)!'^- 
tence of restoring something which existed in the 
days of Edward the Sixth, when the face of every 
thing around us was as different as can be from the 
present. Since that time the opportunities of 
instruction to the very lowest classes (of as much 
instruction as may be beneficial and not pernicious 
to them) have multiplied beyond what the pro- 
phetic spirit of the first suggester of this charity* 
could have predicted, or the wishes of that holy 

* Bishop Ridley, in a Sermon preached before King Edward 
the Sixth. 



54 Christ's hospital. 

man have even aspired to. There are parochial 
schools, and Bell's and Lancaster's, with their arms 
open to receive every son of ignorance, and dis- 
perse the last fog of uninstructed darkness which 
dwells upon the land. What harm, then, if in the 
heart of this noble City tliere should be left one 
receptacle, where parents of rather more liberal 
views, but whose time-straightened circumstances 
do not admit of affording their children that better 
sort of education which they themselves, not with- 
out cost to their parents, have received, may with- 
out cost send their sons? For such Christ's 
Hospital unfolds her bounty. To comfort the 
desponding parent with the thought that, without 
diminishing the stock which is imperiously demand- 
ed to furnish the more pressing and homely wants 
of our nature, he has disposed of one or more per- 
haps out of a numerous offspring, under the shelter 
of a care scarce less tender than the paternal, where 
not only their bodily cravings shall be supplied, but 
that mental pahulum is also dispensed, which He 
hath declared to be no less necessary to our suste- 
nance, who said, that " not by bread alone man can 
live." Here neither, on the one hand, are the youth 
lifted up above their family, which we must suppose 
liberal though reduced ; nor, on the other hand, are 
they liable to be depressed below its level by the 
mean habits and sentiments which a common char- 



Christ's hospital. 55 

ity-school generates. It is, in a word, an Institu- 
tion to keep those who have yet held up their heads 
in the world from sinking ; to keep alive the spirit 
of a decent household, when poverty was in danger 
of crushing it; to assist those who are the most 
willing, but not always the most able, to assist them- 
selves ; to separate a child from his family for a 
season, in order to render him back hereafter, with 
feelings and habits more congenial to it, than he 
could even have attained by remaining at home in 
the bosom of it. It is a preserving and renovat- 
ing principle, an antidote for the res angusta domi^ 
when it presses, as it always does, most heavily upon 
the most ingenuous natures. 

This is Christ's Hospital; and whether its char- 
acter would be improved by confining its advant- 
ages to the very lowest of the people, let those 
judge who have witnessed the looks, the gestures, 
the behaviour, the manner of their play with one 
another, their deportment towards strangers, the 
whole aspect and physiognomy of that vast assem- 
blage of boys on the London foundation, who 
freshen and make alive again with their sports the 
else moiddering cloisters of the old Grey Friars — 
which strangers who have never witnessed, if they 
pass through Newgate-street, or by Smithfield, 
would do well to go a little out of their way to see : 
let those judge, I say, who have compared this 



66 chkist's hospital. 

scene witli tlie abject countenances, the squalid 
mirth, the broken-down spirit, and crouching, or 
else fierce and brutal deportment to strangers, of 
the very different sets of little beings who range 
round the precincts of common orphan schools and 
places of charity. 

For the Christ's Hospital boy feels that he is no 
charity-boy; he feels it in the antiquity and regal- 
ity of the foundation to which he belongs ; in the 
usage which he meets with at school, and the treat- 
ment he is accustomed to out of its bounds ; in the 
respect, and even kindness, which his well-known 
garb never fails to procure him in the streets of the 
Metropolis ; he feels it in his education, in that meas- 
ure of classical attainments, which every individual 
at that school, though not destined to a learned 
profession, has it in his power to procure, attainments 
which it would be worse than folly to put it in the 
reach of the labouring classes to acquire : he feels it 
in the numberless comforts, and even magnificences, 
which surround him ; in his old and awful cloisters, 
with their traditions ; in his spacious school-rooms, 
and in the well-ordered, airy, and lofty rooms where 
he sleeps; in his stately dining hall, hung round 
with pictures by Verrio, Lely, and others, one of 
them surpassing in size and grandeur almost any 
other in the kingdom ; * above all, in the very 

*By Verrio, representing James tire Second on his throne, 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL. 57 

extent and magnitude of the body 'to which he 
belongs, and the consequent spirit, the intelligence, 
and public conscience, which is the result of so' 
many various yet wonderfully combining members. 
Compared with this last-named advantage, what is 
the stock of information, (I do not here speak of 
book-learning, but of that knowledge which boy 
receives from boy,) the mass of collected opinions, 
the intelligence in common, among the few and 
narrow members of an ordinary boarding-school? 

The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy has a 
distmctive character of his own, as far removed 
from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy, 
as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad 
brought up at some other of the Public Schools, 
There i^ pride in it, accumulated from the circum- 
stances which I have described as differencing him 
from the former; and there is a restraimncj mod- 
esty, from a sense of obligation and dependance, 
which must ever keep his deportment from assim- 
ilating to that of the latter. His very garb, as it 
IS antique and venerable, feeds his self-respect ; as 
It IS a badge of dependance, it restrains the natural 
petulance of that age from breaking out into overt- 
acts of insolence. This produces silence and a 

surrounded by his courtiers (all curious portraits), receiving the 
mathematical pupils at their annual presentation, a custom still 
kept up on New-year's-day at Court. 



58 Christ's hospital. 

reserve before strangers, yet not that cowardly shy* 
ness which boys mewed up at home will feel; he 
will speak up when spoken to, but the stranger 
must begin the conversation with him. Within 
his bounds he is all fire and play; but in the 
streets he steals along with all the self-concentra- 
tion of a young monk. He is never known to mix 
with other boys ; they are a sort of laity to him. 
All this proceeds, I have no doubt, from the con- 
tinual consciousness which he carries about him of 
the difference of his dress from that of the rest of 
the world; with a modest jealousy over himself, 
lest, by over-hastily mixing with common and 
secular playfellows, he should commit the dignity 
of his cloth. Nor let any one laugh at this ; for, 
considering the projDcnsity of the multitude, and 
especially of the small multitude, to ridicule any- 
thing unusual in dress — above all, where such 
peculiarity may be construed by malice into a 
mark of dis23aragement — this reserve will appear 
to be nothing more than a wise instinct in the Blue- 
coat boy. That it is neither pride nor rusticity, at 
least that it has none of the offensive qualities of 
either, a stranger may soon satisfy himself by put- 
ting a question to any of these boys : he may be 
sure of an answer couched in terms of plain civil- 
ity, neither loquacious nor embarrassed. Let him 
put the same question to a Parish boy, or to one 



Christ's hospital. 59 

of tlie Trenclier-caps in tlie Cloisters ; and tlie 

impudent reply of the one shall not fail to exasper- 
ate, any more than the certain servility, and merce- 
nary eye to reward, which he will meet with in 
the other, can fail to depress and sadden him. 

The Christ's Hospital boy is a religious charac- 
ter. His school is eminently a religious founda- 
tion ; it has its peculiar prayers, its services at set 
times, its graces, hymns, and anthems, following 
each other in an almost monastic closeness of suc- 
cession. This religious character in him is not 
always mitinged with superstition. That is not 
wonderful, when we consider the thousand tales and 
traditions which must circulate, with undisturbed 
credulity, amongst so many boys, that have so few 
checks to their belief from any intercourse with the 
world at large; upon whom their equals in age 
must work so much, their elders so little. With 
this leaning towards an over-belief in matters of 
Religion, which will soon correct itself when he 
comes out into society, may be classed a turn for 
Romance above most other boys. This is to be 
traced in the same manner to their excess of society 
with each other, and defect of mingling with the 
world. Hence the peculiar avidity with which such 
books as the Arabian Nights Entertainments, and 
others of a still wilder cast, are, or at least were in 
my time, sought for by the boys. I remember 



60 Christ's hospital. 

when some lialf dozen of them set off from school, 
without map, card, or compass, on a serious expedi- 
tion to find out Philip QuarlVs Island. 

The Christ's Hospital Boy's sense of right and 
wrong is peculiarly tender and apprehensive. It 
is even apt to run out into ceremonial observances; 
and to impose a yoke upon itself beyond the strict 
obligations of the moral law. Those who were con- 
temporaries with me at that School iive-and-twenty 
or thirty years ago, will remember with what more 
than Judaic rigour the eating of the fat of certain 
boiled meats* was interdicted. A boy would have 
blushed, as at the exposure of some heinous immor- 
ality, to have been detected eating that forbidden 
portion of his allowance of animal food, the whole 
of which, while he was in health, was little more 
than sufficient to allay his hunger. The same, or 
even greater, refinement was shewn in the rejection 
of certain kinds of sweet cake. What gave rise to 
these supererogatory penances, these self-denying 
ordinances, I could never learn ;f they certainly 

* Under the denomination of gags. 

1 1 am told that the present Steward, who has evinced on 
many occasions a most praise-worthy anxiety to promote the 
comfort of the boys, had occasion for all his address and perse- 
verance to eradicate the first of these mifortunate prejudftces, in 
which he has at length happily succeeded, and thereby restored 
to one half of the animal nutrition of the School those honours 
which painful superstition and blind zeal had so long conspired 
to withhold from it. 



Christ's hospital. 61 

argue no defect of the conscientious principle. A 
little excess in that article is not undesirable in 
youth, to make allowance for the inevitable waste 
which comes in maturer years. But in the less 
ambiguous line of duty, in those directions of the 
moral feelings which cannot be mistaken or depre- 
ciated, I will relate what took place in the year 
1785, when Mr. Perry, the Steward, died. I must 
be pardoned for taking my instances from my own 
times. Indeed, the vividness of my recollections, 
while I am upon this subject, almost bring back 
those times ; they are present to me still. But I 
believe that in the years which have elapsed since 
the period which I speak of, the character of the 
Christ's Hospital boy is very little changed. Their 
situation in point of many comforts is improved; 
but that which I ventured before to term the 
public conscience of the School, the pervading 
moral sense, of which every mind partakes, and 
to which so many individual minds contribute, 
remains, I believe, pretty much the same as when 
I left it. I have seen within this twelvemonth 
almost the change which has been produced upon 
a boy of eight or nine years of age, upon being 
admitted into that school ; how, from a pert young 
coxcomb, who thought that all knowledge was com- 
prehended within his shallow brains, because a smat- 
tering of two or three languages and one or two 



62 Christ's hospital. 

sciences were stuffed into him by injudicious treat- 
ment at home, by a mixture with the wholesome 
society of so many school-fellows, in less time than 
I have spoken of, he has sunk to his own level, and 
is contented to be carried on in the quiet orb of 
modest seK-knowledge in which the common mass 
of that unpresumptuous assemblage of boys seem 
to move on : from being a little unfeeling mortal, 
he has got to feel and reflect. Nor would it be a 
difficult matter to shew how at a school like this 
where the boy is neither entirely separated from 
home, nor yet exclusively under its influence, the 
best feelings, the filial for instance, are brought to 
a maturity, which they could not have attained 
under a comj)letely domestic education; how the 
relation of parent is rendered less tender by unre- 
mitted association, and the very awfulness of age 
is best apprehended by some sojourning amidst the 
comparative levity of youth; how absence, not 
drawn out by too great extension into alienation 
or forgetfulness, puts an edge upon the relish of 
occasional intercourse, and the boy is made the 
better child by that which keeps the force of that 
relation from being felt as perpetually ^Dressing on 
him ; how the substituted paternity, into the care of 
which he is adopted, while in everything substantial 
it makes up for the natural, in the necessary omis- 
sion of individual fondnesses and partialities, directs 



Christ's hospital. 63 

the mind only the more strongly to appreciate that 
natural and first tie, in which such weaknesses are 
the bond of strength, and the appetite which craves 
after them betrays no j)erverse palate But these 
speculations rather belong to the question of the 
comparative advantages of a public over a private 
education in general. I must get back to my 
favourite school; and to that which took place 
when our old and good Steward died. 

And I will say, that when I think of the frequent 
instances which I have met with in children, of a 
hard-heartedness, a callousness, and insensibility to 
the loss of relations, even of those who have begot 
and nourished them, I cannot but consider it as a 
proof of something in the peculiar conformation of 
that School, favourable to the expansion of the best 
feelings of our nature, that, at the period which I 
am noticing, out of five hundred boys there was not 
a dry eye to be fomid among them, nor a heart that 
did not beat with genuine emotion Every impulse 
to play, until the funeral day was past, seemed sus- 
pended throughout the School ; and the boys, lately 
so mirthful and spritely, were seen j)acing their 
cloisters alone, or in sad groupes standing about, 
few of them without some token, such as their 
slender means could provide, a black ribband, or 
something to denote respect, and a sense of their 
loss. The time itself was a time of anarchy, a time 



64 Christ's hospital. 

in wliicli all authority (out of scliool-liours) was 
abandoned. The ordinary restraints were for those 
days superseded; and the gates, which at other 
times kept us in, were left without watchers. Yet, 
with the exception of one or two graceless boys at 
most, who took advantage of that suspension of 
authorities to sulk out^ as it was called, the whole 
body of that great School kej^t rigorously within 
their bounds by a voluntary self -imprisonment ; and 
they who broke bounds, though they escaped pun- 
ishment from any Master, fell into a general disre- 
pute among us, and, for that which at any other 
time would have been applauded and admired as 
a mark of spirit, were consigned to infamy and 
reprobation : so much natural government have 
gratitude and the principles of reverence and love, 
and so much did a respect to their dead friend pre- 
vail with these Christ's Hospital boys above any 
fear which his presence among them when living 
could ever produce. And if the impressions which 
were made on my mind so long ago are to be 
trusted, very richly did their Steward deserve this 
tribute. It is a pleasure to me even now to call to 
mind his portly form, the regal awe which he 
always contrived to inspire, in spite of a tenderness 
and even weakness of nature that would have 
enfeebled the reins of discipline in any other mas- 
ter ; a yearning of tenderness towards those under 



Christ's hospital. 65 

Ms protection, wliich could make five hundred boys 
at once feel towards liim. eacli as to tlieir individual 
father. He liad faults, with, which we had nothing 
to do ; but with all his faults, indeed Mr. Perry was 
a most extraordinary creature. Contemporary with 
him, and still living, though he has long since 
resigned his occupation, will it be impertinent to 
mention the name of our excellent Upper Gram- 
mar-Master, the Rev. James Boyer?. He was a 
disciplinarian, indeed, of a different stamp from 
him whom I have just described ; but, now the 
terrors of the rod, and of a temper a little too 
hasty to leave the more nervous of us quite at our 
ease to do justice to his merits in those days, are 
long since over, ungrateful were we if we should 
refuse our testimony to that unwearied assiduity 
with which he attended to the particular improve- 
ment of each of us. Had we been the offspring of 
the first gentry in the land, he could not have been 
instigated by the strongest views of recompence 
and reward to have made himself a greater slave 
to the most laborious of all occupations than he 
did for us sons of charity, from whom, or from our 
parents, he could expect nothing. He has had his 
reward in the satisfaction of having discharged his 
duty, in the pleasurable consciousness of having 
advanced the respectability of that Institution to 
which, both man and boy, he was attached: in 



66 Christ's hospital. 

the honours to which so many of his pupils have 
successfully aspired at both our Universities ; and 
in the staff with which the Governors of the Hospi- 
tal at the close of his hard labours, with the highest 
expressions of the obligations the School lay under 
to him, unanimously voted to present him. 

I have often considered it among the felicities of 
the constitution of this School, that the offices of 
Steward and Schoolmaster are kept distinct; the 
strict business of education alone devolving upon 
the latter, while the former has the charge of all 
things out of school, the controul of the provisions, 
the regulation of meals, of dress, of play, and the 
ordinary intercourse of the boys. By this divi- 
sion of management, a superior respectability must 
attach to the teacher, while his office is unmixed 
with any of these lower concerns. A still greater 
advantage over the construction of common board- 
ing-schools is to be found in the settled salaries of 
the Masters, rendering them totally free of obliga- 
tion to any individual pupil or his parents. This 
never fails to have its effect at schools where each 
boy can reckon up to a hair what profit the master 
derives from him, where he views him every day 
in the light of a caterer, a provider for the family, 
who is to get so much by him in each of his meals. 
Boys will see and consider these things ; and how 
much must the sacred character of Preceptor suffer 



Christ's hospital. 67 

in their minds by these degrading associations! 
The very bill which the pupil carries home with 
him at Christmas, eked out, perhaps, with elaborate 
though necessary minuteness, instructs him that 
his teachers have other ends than the mere love to 
Learning in the lessons which they give him ; and 
though they put into his hands the fine sayings of 
Seneca or Epictetus, yet they themselves are none 
of those disinterested pedagogues to teach philoso- 
phy gratis. The master, too, is sensible that he is 
seen in this light ; and how much this must lessen 
that affectionate regard to the learners which alone 
can sweeten the bitter labour of instruction, and 
convert the whole business into unwelcome and 
uninteresting task-work, many Preceptors that I 
have conversed with on the subject are ready with 
a sad heart to acknowledge. From this inconven- 
ience the settled salaries of the Masters of this 
School in great measure exempt them; while the 
happy custom of chusing Masters (indeed every 
Officer of the Establishment) from those who have 
received their education there, gives them an inter- 
est in advancing the character of the School, and 
binds them to observe a tenderness and a respect to 
the children, in which a stranger, feeling that inde- 
pendence which I have spoken of, might well be 
expected to fail. 

In affectionate recollections of the place where 



68 Christ's hospital. . 

he was bred up, in hearty recognitions of old 
school-fellows met with again after the lapse of 
years, or in foreign countries, the Christ's Plospital 
boy yields to none ; I might almost say, he goes 
beyond most other boys. The very compass and 
magnitude of the School, its thousand bearings, the 
space it takes up in the imagination beyond the 
sphere of ordinary schools, impresses a re-mem- 
brance, accompanied with an elevation of mind, 
that attends him through life. It is too big, too 
affecting an object, to pass away quickly from his 
mind. The Christ's Hospital boy's friends at 
school are commonly his intimates through life. 
For me, I do not know whether a constitutional 
imbecility does not incline me too obstinately to 
cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an 
inverted ratio to the usual sentiments of mankind, 
nothing that I have been engaged in since seems of 
any value or importance, compared to the colours 
which imagination gave to everything then. I 
belong to no hody corporate such as I then made 
a part of. — And here, before I close, taking leave 
of the general reader, and addressing myself solely 
to my old schoolfellows, that were contemporaries 
with me from the year 1782 to 1789, let me have 
leave to remember some of those circumstances of 
our School, which they will not be unwilling to 
have brought back to their minds. 



Christ's hospital, 69 

And first, let us remember, as first in importance 
in our childish eyes, the young men (as they almost 
were) who, under the denomination of Grecians^ 
were waiting the expiration of the period when they 
shoidd be sent, at the charges of the Hospital, to 
one or other of our Universities, but more fre- 
quently to Cambridge. These youths, from their 
superior acquirements, their superior age and stat- 
ure, and the fewness of their numbers (for seldom 
above two or three at a time were inaugurated into 
that high order), drew the eyes of all, and espe- 
cially of the younger boys, into a reverent ob- 
servance and admiration. How tall they used to 
seem to us ! how stately would they pace along the 
Cloisters!— while the play of the lesser boys was 
absolutely suspended, or its boisterousness at least 
allayed, at their presence ! Not that they ever beat 
or struck the boys — that would have been to have 
demeaned themselves — the dignity of their j)ersons 
alone insured them all respect. The task of blows, 
of corporal chastisement, they left to the common 
Monitors, or Heads of Wards, who, it must be con- 
fessed, in our time had rather too much licence 
allowed them to oppress and misuse their inferiors; 
and the interference of the Grecian, who may be 
considered as the spiritual power, was not unfre- 
quently called for, to mitigate by its mediation the 
heavy unrelenting arm of this temporal power, or 



70 Christ's hospital. 

monitor. In fine, the Grecians were the solemn 
Muftis of the School, ^ras were computed from 
their time ; — it used to be said, such or such a 

thing was done when S or T was Grecian. 

As I ventured to call the Grecians the Muftis of 
the School, the King's boys,* as their character then 
was, may well pass for the Janizaries. They were 
the terror of all the other boys ; bred up under 
that hardy sailor, as well as excellent mathemati- 
cian, and co-navigator with Captain Cook, William 
Wales. All his systems were adapted to fit them 
for the rough element which they were destined 
to encounter. Frequent and severe punishments, 
which were expected to be borne with more than 
Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as 
inflictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate 
endurance. To make his boys hardy, and to ^ive 
them early sailor habits, seemed to be his only aim; 
to this everything was subordinate. Moral obliqui- 
ties, indeed, were sure of receiving their full recom- 
pence, for no occasion of laying on the lash was 
ever let slip ; but the effects expected to be pro- 
duced from it were something very different from 
contrition or mortification. There was in William 
Wales a perpetual fund of humour, a constant glee 
about him, which, heightened by an inveterate pro- 

*The mathematical pupils, bred up to the sea, on the founda- 
tion of Charles the Second. 



CHRIST S HOSPITAL. 71 

vincialism of North-country dialect, absolutely took 
away the sting from his severities. His punish- 
ments were a game at j^atience, in which the Master 
was not always worst contented when he found him- 
self at times overcome by his pupil. What success 
this discipline had, or how the effects of it oper- 
ated upon the after-lives of these King's boys, I 
cannot say ; but 1 am sure that, for the time, they 
were absolute nuisances to the rest of the School. 
Hardy, brutal, and often wicked, they were the 
most graceless lump in the whole mass ; older and 
bigger than the other boys (for by the system of 
their education they were kept longer at school by 
two or three years than any of the rest, except 
the Grecians) they were a constant terror to the 
younger part of the School; and some who may 
read this, I doubt not, will remember the consterna- 
tion into which the juvenile fry of us were thrown, 
when the cry was raised in the Cloisters, that the 
First Order was coming — for so they termed the 
first form or class of those boys. Still these sea- 
boys answered some good purposes in the School. 
They were the military class among the boys, fore- 
most in athletic exercises, who extended the fame 
of the prowess of the School far and near ; and 
the apprentices in the vicinage, and sometimes the 
butchers' boys in the neighbouring market, had 
sad occasion to attest their valour. 



72 Christ's hospital. 

The time would fail me if I were to attempt to 
enumerate all those circumstances, some pleasant, 
some attended with some pain, which, seen through 
the mist of distance, come sweetly softened to the 
memory. But I must crave leave to remember 
our transcending superiority in those invigorating 
sports, leap-frog, and basting the bear ; our delight- 
ful excursions in the Summer holidays to the New 
River, near Newington, where, like otters, we 
would live the long day in the water, never caring 
for dressing ourselves when we had once stript ; 
our savoury meals afterwards, when we came home 
almost famished with staying out all day without 
our dinners ; our visits at other times to the Tower, 
where, by antient privilege, we had free access to 
all the curiosities ; our solemn processions through 
the City at Easter, with the Lord Mayor's largess 
of buns, wine, and a shilling, with the festive ques- 
tions and civic pleasantries of the dispensing Alder- 
men, which were more to us than all the rest of the 
banquet; our stately suppings in public, where the 
well-lighted hall, and the confluence of well-dressed 
company who came to see us, made the whole look 
more like a concert or assembly, than a scene of a 
plain bread and cheese collation; the annual ora- 
tions upon St. Matthew's Day, in which the Senior 
Scholar, before he had done, seldom failed to 
reckon up, among those who had done honour to 



Christ's hospital. 73 

our School by being educated in it, the names 
of those accomplished critics and Greek scholars, 
Joshua Barnes and Jeremiah Markland (I marvel 
they left out Camden while they were about it). 
Let me have leave to remember our hymns, and 
anthems, and well-toned organ ; the doleful tune of 
the burial anthem chanted in the solemn Cloisters, 
upon the seldom-occurring funeral of Sjome school- 
fellow; the festivities at Christmas, when the rich- 
est of us would club our stock to have a gaudy day, 
sitting round the fire, replenished to the heiglit 
with logs ; and the pennyless, and he that could 
contribute nothing, partook in all the mirth, and in 
some of the substantialities of the feasting : the 
carol sung by night at that time of the year, which, 
when a young boy, I have so often lain awake from 
seven (the hour of going to bed) till ten, when it 
was sung by the older boys and monitors, and have 
listened to it, in their rude chanting, till I have 
been transported in fancy to the fields of Bethle- 
hem, and the song which was sung at that season 
by Angels' voices to the shepherds. 

Nor would I willingly forget any of those things 
which administered to our vanity. The hem- 
stitched bands, and town-made shirts, which some 
of the most fashionable among us wore ; the town- 
girdles, with buckles of silver, or shining stone; 
the badges of the sea-boys; the cots, or superior 



74 Christ's hospital. 

shoe-strings of the Monitors ; the medals of the 
markers (those who were appointed to hear the 
Bible read in the Wards on Sunday morning and 
evening), which bore on their obverse in silver, as 
certain parts of our garments carried in meaner 
metal, the countenance of our Founder, that godly 
and royal child. King Edward the Sixth, the flower 
of the Tudor name — the young flower that was 
untimely cropt as it began to fill our land with 
its early odours — the boy-patron of boys — the 
serious and holy child who walked with Cranmer 
and Ridley — fit associate, in those tender years, 
for the bishops and future martyrs of our Church, 
to receive, or (as occasion sometimes proved) to 
give instruction. 

"But ah; what means the silent tear? 
Why e'en 'mid joy my bosom heave? 
Ye long-lost scenes, enchantments^dear! 
Lo ! now I linger o'er your grave. 

*' Fly then, ye hours of rosy hue, 

And bear away the bloom of years ! 
And quick succeed, ye sickly crew 

Of doubts and sorrows, pains and fears ! 

*' Still will I ponder Fate's unalter'd plan, 
Nor, tracing back the child, forget that I am man." * 

* Lines meditated in the Cloisters of Christ's Hospital, in the 
" Poetics " of Mr. George Dyer. 



Christ's hospital. 75 



ON CHKIST'S HOSPITAL, AND THE CHAR- 
ACTER OF THE CHRIST'S 
HOSPITAL BOYS. 

[This essay was the author's sole contribution to the Gentle- 
man's Magazine, and was suggested by various abuses of the 
right of presentation, recently brought to public notice. Christ's 
Hospital was founded expressly for orphans, but changing con- 
ditions had caused the governors to admit boys whose parents 
were not able to provide for their support and education. At 
the time that this essay was written, however, the son of a clergy- 
man with ;i^i2oo a year was being educated at the school. Such 
evident disregard of the spirit as well as the letter of the foun- 
dation did not pass unheeded, and the friends and beneficiaries 
of the school rushed into print for the preservation of the ancient 
rules of the institution. E. D. H.J 

PAGE 

52 — Costume of this school, Leigli Hunt, who 
was a pupil at Christ's Hospital, not long after 
Lamb left, thus describes the costume of the boys : 
" Our dress was of the coarsest and quaintest kind, 
but was respected out of doors, and is so. It con- 
sisted of a blue drugget gown, or body, with ample 
coats to it; a yeUow vest underneath in winter- 
time ; small-clothes of Russia duck ; worsted yellow 



76 cheist's hospital, 

stockings ; a leathern girdle ; and a little black 
worsted cap, usually carried in tlie hand. I believe 
it was the ordinary dress of children in humble life, 
during the reign of the Tudor s. We used to flat- 
ter ourselves that it was taken from the monks. 

59 — A religious foundation. Leigh Hunt, in 
his Autobiography gives a different view of the 
religious services : " On Sundays, the school-time of 
the other days was occupied in church, both morn- 
ing and evening ; and as the Bible was read to us 
every day before every meal, and on going to bed, 
besides prayers and graces, we rivalled the monks 
in the religious part of our duties. The effect was 
certainly not what was intended. ... I, for 
one, . . . began secretly to become as indiffer- 
ent as I thought the preachers ; and, though the 
morals of the school were in the main excellent and 
exemplary, we all felt, without knowing it, that it 
was the orderliness and example of the general sys- 
tem that kept us so, and not the leligious part of 
it; which seldom entered our heads at all, and only 
tired us when it did." 

60 — Philip QuarlVs Island. "The Hermit, or 
the Sufferings and Adventures of Philip Quarll, an 
Englishman," an anonymous Romance, largely an 
imitation of "Robinson Crusoe," published in 1727. 

65 — Hev. James Boyer. The character of this 
stern and eccentric master is drawn in both the 



chkist's hospital. 77 

Christ's Hospital essays witli the greatest frank- 
ness. We leave his eccentricities untouched for 
the present, adding to the praise already given the 
encomiums of Coleridge: "At school (Christ's 
Hospital) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a 
very sensible, though at the same time, a very 
severe master, the Reverend James Bowyer " (^sic.^ 
" He sent us to the University excellent Latin and 
Greek scholars, and tolerable Hebraists. Yet our 
classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts, 
which we derived from his zealous and conscien- 
tious tutorage. He is now gone to his final reward, 
full of years, and full of honors, even those honors, 
which were dearest to his heart, as gratefully be- 
stowed by that school, and still binding him to the 
interests of that school, in which he had been him- 
self educated, and to which during his whole life he 
was a dedicated thing." 

68 — His intimates through life. In Lamb's 
own case this was particularly true. Among his 
life-long friends were George Dyer, Thomas Barnes, 
Barron Field, James White, and Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge, all school-fellows at Christ's. 

70 — ■ William Wales. Leigh Hunt says of him : 
"He was a good man, of plain, simple manners, 
with a heavy, large person, and a benign counte- 
nance." 

71 — The First Order was coming. To quote 



78 cheist's hospital. 

Hunt once more : " It was etiquette among them 
never to move out of a right line when they walked, 
whoever stood in their way ... If aware, the 
boys got out of his way ; if not, down they went, 
one or more; away rolled the top or the marbles, 
and on walked the future captain." 



FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 79 



CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE AND THIETY 
YEARS AGO. 

[London Magazine, November, 1820] 

It requires some familiarity with Lamb's love 
of masquerading ... to disengage fact from 
fancy, and extract what refers to himself only, in 
these two papers: ["On Christ's Hospital," and 
" Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago."] 
The former is, what it purports to be, a serious 
tribute of praise to the dignified and elevating 
character of the great charity by which he had 
been fostered. It speaks chiefly of the young 
scholar's pride in the antiquity of the foundation 
and the monastic customs and ritual which had 
survived into modern times; . . . with many 
touching reminiscences of the happy days spent 
in country excursions or visits to the sights of 
London. But in calling up these recollections, it 
seems to have struck Lamb that his old school, 
like other institutions, had more than one side, and 



80 FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

that the grievances of school-boys, real and imag- 
inary, as well as the humorous side of some of 
the regulations and traditions of the school, might 
supj)ly material for another picture not less inter- 
esting. Accordingly, under the disguise of the 
signature Elia^ he wrote a second account of his 
school, purporting to be a corrective of the over- 
coloring employed by " Mr. Lamb " in the former 
account. . . . The friendless boy whose per- 
sonality is thus assumed, was young Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge. 

— Alfred Ainger, 



FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 81 



CHKIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE AND THIKTY 
YEARS AGO. 

In Mr. Lamb's "Works," published a year or 
two since, I find a magnificent eulogy on my old 
school,* such as it was, or now appears to him to 
have been, between the years 1782 and 1789. It 
happens, very oddly, that my own standing at 
Christ's was nearly corresponding with his ; and, 
with all gratitude to him for his enthusiasm for the 
cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring together 
whatever can be said in praise of them, dropping 
all the other side of the argument most ingeniously. 

I remember L. at school; and can well recollect 
that he had some peculiar advantages, which I and 
others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends 
lived in town, and were near at hand ; and he had 
the privilege of going to see them, almost as often 
as he wished, through some invidious distinction, 
which was denied to us. The present worthy sub- 

* Recollections of Christ's Hospital. 



82 FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

treasurer to the Inner Temple can explain liow 
that happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in a 
morning, while we were battening upon our quarter 
of a penny loaf — our crug — moistened with atten- 
uated small beer, in wooden piggins, smacking of 
the pitched leathern jack, it was poured from. 
Our Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless, 
and the peas soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, 
were enriched for him with a slice of " extraordi- 
nary bread and butter," from the hot-loaf of the 
Temple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, some- 
what less repugnant — (we had three banyan to 
four meat days in the week) — was endeared to 
his palate with a lump of double-refined, and a 
smack of ginger (to make it go down the more 
glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our 
lialf-pickled Sundays, or quite fresh boiled beef 
on Thursdays (strong as caro equina^ with detest- 
able marigolds floating in the pail to poison the 
broth — our scanty mutton crags on Fridays — 
and rather more savoury, but grudging, portions 
of the same flesh, rotten-roasted or rear, on the 
Tuesdays (the only dish which excited our appe- 
tites, and disappointed our stomachs, in almost 
equal proportion) - — he had his hot plate of roast 
veal, or the more tempting griskin (exotics un- 
known to our palates) cooked in the paternal 
kitchen (a great thing) and brought him daily by 



FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 83 

his maid or aiiiit ! I remember tlie good old rela- 
tive (in wliom. love forbade pride,) squatting down 
upon some odd stone in a by-nook of tlie cloisters, 
disclosing the viands (of higher regale than those 
cates which the ravens ministered to the Tishbite) ; 
and the contending passions of L. at the unfolding. 
There was love for the bringer ; shame for the 
thing brought, and the manner of its bringing; 
sympathy for those who were too many to share in 
it; and, at top of all, hunger (eldest, strongest of 
the passions ! ) predominant, breaking down the 
stony fences of shame, and aukwardness, and -a 
troubling over-consciousness. 

I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and 
those who should care for me, were far away. 
Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could 
reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, 
after a little forced notice, which they had the 
grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, 
soon grew tired of my holyday visits. They 
seemed to them to recur too often, though I 
thought them few enough ; and, one after another, 
they all failed me, and I felt myself alone among 
six hundred j)lay mates. 

O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his 
early home-stead ! The yearnings which I used to 
have towards it in those unfledged years ! How, 
in my dreams, would my native town (far in the 



84 FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

west) come back, with its church, and trees, and 
faces ! How I would wake weeping, and in the 
anguish of my heart exclaim upon sweet Cahie in 
Wiltshire ! 

To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions 
left by the recollection of those friendless holydays. 
The long warm days of summer never return but 
they bring with them a gloom from the haunting 
memory of those whole-day -leaves^ when, by some 
strange arrangement, we were turned out, for the 
live-long day, upon our own hands, whether we had 
friends to go to, or none. I remember those bath- 
ing-excursions to the New-River, which L. recalls 
with such relish, better, I think, than he can — for 
he was a home-seeking lad, and did not much care 
for such water-pastimes : — How merrily we would 
sally forth into the fields ; and strip under the first 
warmth of the sun ; and wanton like young dace in 
the streams ; getting us appetites for noon, which 
those of us that were pennyless (our scanty morn- 
ing crust long since exhausted) had not the means 
of allaying — while the cattle, and the birds, and 
the fishes, were at feed about us, and we had noth- 
ing to satisfy our cravings — the very beauty of the 
day, and the exercise of the pastime, and the sense 
of liberty, setting a keener edge upon them ! — 
How faint and languid, finally, we would return, 
towards night-fall, to our desired morsel, half- 



FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 85 

rejoicing, lialf reluctant, that tlie hours of our 
uneasy liberty had expired I 

It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowl- 
ing about the streets objectless — shivering at cold 
windows of print-shops, to extract a little amuse- 
ment; or haply, as a last resort, in the hope of a 
little novelty, to pay a fifty-times repeatei visit 
(where our individual faces should be as well 
known to the warden as those of his own charges) 
to the Lions in the Tower — to whose levee, by 
courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to 
admission. 

L.'s governor (so we called the patron who pre- 
sented us to the foundation) lived in a manner 
under his paternal roof. Any complaint which he 
had to make was sure of being attended to. This 
was understood at Christ's, and was an effectual 
screen to him against the severity of masters, or 
worse tyranny of the monitors. The oppressions of 
these young brutes are heart-sickening to call to 
recollection. I have been called out of my bed, 
and waked for the purpose^ in the coldest winter 
nights — and this not once, but night after night — 
in my shirt, to receive the discij)line of a leathern 
thong, with eleven other sufferers, because it pleased 
my callous overseer, when there has been any talk- 
ing heard after we were gone to bed, to make the 
six last beds in the dormitory, where the youngest 



86 FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

children of us slept, answerable for an offence tliey 
neither dared to commit, nor had the power to 

hinder. The same execrable tyranny drove the 

younger part of us from the fires, when our feet 
were perishing with snow ; and, under the cruellest 
penalties, forbad the indulgence of a drink of 
water, when we lay in sleepless summer nights, 
fevered with the season, and the day's sports. 

There was one H , who, I learned, in after- 
days, was seen expiating some maturer offence in 
the hulks. (Do I flatter myself in fancying that 
this might be the planter of that name, who suf- 
fered at Nevis, I think, or St. Kits, some 

few years since ? My friend Tobin was the benevo- 
lent instrument of bringing him to the gallows.) 
This petty Nero actually branded a boy, who had 
offended him, with a red-hot iron ; and nearly 
starved forty of us, with exacting contributions, to 
the one half of our bread, to pamper a young ass, 
which, incredible as it may seem, with the conniv- 
ance of the nurse's daughter (a young flame of 
his) he had contrived to smuggle in, and keep upon 
the leads of the ward^ as they called our dormi- 
tories. This game went on for better than a week, 
till the foolish beast, not able to fare well but 
he must cry roast meat — happier than Caligula's 
minion, could he have kept his own counsel — but, 
foolisher, alas ! than any of his species in the fables 



FIVE a:nd thiktt tears ago. 87 

— waxing fat, and kicking, in the fulness of bread, 
one unlucky minute would needs proclaim Ms good 
fortune to the world below; and, laying out his 
simple throat, blew such a ram's horn blast, as 
(toppling down the walls of his own Jericho) set 
concealment any longer at defiance. The client 
was dismissed, with certain attentions, to Smith- 
field; but I never understood that the patron 
underwent any censure on the occasion. This was 
in the stewardship of L.'s admired Perry. 

Under the same facile administration, can L. 
have forgotten the cool impunity with which the 
nurses used to carry away openly, in open platters, 
for their own tables, one out of two of every hot 
joint, which the careful matron had been seeing 
scrupulously weighed out for our dinners ? These 
things were daily practised in that magnificent 
apartment, which L. (grown connoisseur since, we 
presume) praises so highly for the grand paintings 
"by Yerrio, and others," with which it is "hung 
round and adorned." But the sight of sleek well- 
fed blue-coat boys in pictures, was, at that time, I 
believe, little consolatory to him, or us, the living 
ones, who saw the better part of our provisions car- 
ried away before our faces by harpies ; and our- 
selves reduced (with the Trojan in the hall of Dido) 

TO FEED OUR MIND WITH IDLE PORTRAITURE. 

L. has recorded the repugnance of the school to 



88 FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

gags^ or the fat of fresh beef boiled; and sets it 
down to some superstition. But these unctuous 
morsels are never grateful to young palates (chil- 
dren are universally fat-haters) - and in strong, 
coarse, boiled meats, unsalted^ are detestable. A 
gag-eater in our time was equivalent to a goul^ and 
held in equal detestation. ^ ^ ^ -^ suffered 
luider the imputation. 

'Twas said, 



.He ate strange flesh. 

He was observed, after dinner, carefully to gather 
up the remnants left at his table (not many, nor 
very choice fragments, you may credit me) — and, 
in an especial manner, these disreputahle inorsels^ 
which he would convey away, and secretly stow in 
the settle that stood at his bedside. None saw 
when hft ate them. It was rumored that he pri- 
vately devoured them in the night. He was 
watched, but no traces of such midnight practices 
were discoverable. Some reported, that, on leave- 
days, he had been seen to carry out of the bounds a 
large blue check handkerchief, full of something. 
This then must be the accursed thing. Conjecture 
next was at work to imagine how he could dispose 
of it. Some said he sold it to the beggars. This 
belief generally prevailed. He went about moping. 
None spake to him. No one would play with him. 



FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 89 

He was excommunicated; put out of the pale of the 
school. He was too powerful a hoy to he heaten, 
hut he underwent every mode of that negative j)un- 
islunent, which is more grevious than many stripes. 
Still he persevered. At length he was ohserved by 
two of his school-fellows, who were determined to 
get at the secret, and had traced liiin. one leave-day 
for that purpose, to enter a large worn-out building 
(such as there exist specimens of in Chancery-lane, 
which are let out to various scales of pauperism) 
with open door, and a common stair-case. After 
him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth 
up four flights, and saw him tap at a poor wicket, 
which was opened by an aged woman, meanly clad. 
Suspicion was now ripened into certainty. The 
informers had secured their victim. They had him 
in their toils. Accusation was formally preferred, 
and retribution most signal was looked for. Mr. 
Hathaway, the then steward (for this hajDpened a 
little after my time,) with that patient sagacity 
which tempered all his conduct, determined to inves- 
tigate the matter, before he proceeded to sentence. 
The result was, that the supposed mendicants, the 
receivers or purchasers of the mysterious scraps, 
turned out to be the parents of , an honest cou- 
ple oome to decay, — whom this seasonable supply 
had, in all ^probability, saved from mendicancy ; and 
that this young stork, at the expence of his own 



90 riYE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

good name, had all this while been only feeding the 
old birds ! — The governors on this occasion, much 
to their honour, voted a present relief to the family 

of ,- and presented him with a silver medal. 

The lesson which the steward read upon rash 
JUDGMENT, on the occasion of publicly delivering 

the medal to , I believe, would not be lost upon 

his auditory. — I had left school then, but I well 

remember . He was a tall, shambling youth, 

with a cast in his eye, not at all calculated to con- 
ciliate hostile prejudices. I have since seen him 
carrying a baker's basket. 1 think I heard he did 
not do quite so well by himself, as he had done by 
the old folks. 

I was a hypochondriac lad; and the sight of a 
boy in fetters, upon the day of my first putting 
on the blue clothes, was not exactly fitted to as- 
suage the natural terrors of initiation. I was of 
tender years, barely turned of seven ; and had only 
read of such things in books, or seen them but in 
dreams. I was told he had run aiuay. This was 
the punishment for the first offence. — As a novice 
I was soon after taken to see the dungeons. These 
were little, square. Bedlam cells, where a boy could 
just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket — 
a mattress, I think, was afterwards substituted — 
with a peep of light, let in ascance, from a prison- 
orifice at top, barely enough to read by. Here tlie 



FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 91 

poor boy was locked in by himself all day, without 
sight of any but the porter who brought him his 
bread and water — who might not speah to him; — 
or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call him 
out to receive his periodical chastisement, which 
was almost welcome, because it separated him for 
a brief interval from solitude : — and here he was 
shut up by himself of nights, out of the reach of 
any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the weak 
nerves, and superstition incident to his time of life, 
might subject him to.* This was the penalty for 
the second offence. Wouldst thou like, reader, to 
see what became of him in the next degree ? 

The culprit, who had been a third time an of- 
fender, and whose expulsion was at this time 
deemed irreversible, was brought forth, as at some 
solemn auto da /e, arrayed in uncouth and most 
appalling attire — all trace of his late "watchet 
weeds" carefully effaced, he was exposed in a 
jacket, resembling those which London lamplight- 
ers formerly delighted in, with a cap of the same. 
The effect of this divestiture was such as the ingen- 

* One or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide, accord- 
ingly, at length convinced the Governors of the impolicy of this 
part of the sentence, and the midnight torture to the spirits was 
dispensed with. — This fancy of dungeons for children, was a 
sprout of Howard's brain; for which (saving the reverence due 
to Holy Paul) methinks, I could willingly spit upon his stony 
gaberdine. 



92 FIVE AND THIETY YEARS AGO. 

ious devisers of it could have anticipated. With 
his pale and frighted features, it was as if some of 
those disfigurements in Dante had seized upon him. 
In this disguisement he was brought into the hall 
{L .\ favourite state-room)^ where awaited him the 
whole number of his school-fellows, whose joint 
lessons and sports he was thenceforth to share no 
more ; the awf id presence of the steward, to be seen 
for the last time ; of the executioner beadle, clad in 
his state robe for the occasion ; and of two faces 
more, of direr import, because never but in these 
extremities visible. These were governors ; two of 
whom, by choice, or charter, were always accus- 
tomed to officiate at these Ultwia Supplicia ; not 
to mitigate (so at least we understood it), but to 
enforce the uttermost stripe. Old Bamber Gas- 
coigne, and Peter Aubert, I remember, were col- 
leagues on one occasion, when the beadle turning 
rather pale, a glass of brandy was ordered to pre- 
pare him for the mysteries. The scourging was, 
after the old Roman fashion, long and stately. 
The lictor accompanied the criminal quite round 
the hall. We were generally too faint with attend- 
ing to the previous disguising circumstances, to 
make accurate report with our eyes of the degree 
of corporal suffering inflicted. Report, of course, 
gave out the back knotty and livid. After scourg- 
ing, he was made over, in his San Benito, to his 



FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 93 

friends, if lie had any (but commonly such poor 
runagates were friendless), or to his parish of&cer, 
who, to enhance the effect of the scene, had his 
station allotted to him on the outside of the hall 
gate. 

These solemn pageantries were not played off so 
often as to spoil the general mirth of the commu- 
nity. We had plenty of exercise and recreation 
after school hours ; and, for myself, I must confess, 
that I was never happier, than in them. The Upper 
and the Lower Grammar Schools were held in the 
same room ; and an imaginary line only divided 
their bounds. Their character was as different as 
that of the inhabitants on the two sides of the 
Pyrennees. The Rev, James Boyer was the Upper 
Master ; but the Rev. Matthew Field presided over 
that portion of the apartment, of which I had the 
good fortune to be a member. We lived a life as 
careless as birds. We talked and did just what we 
pleased, and nobody molested us. We carried an 
accidence, or a grammar, for form; but, for any 
trouble it gave us, we might take two years in get- 
ting through the verbs deponent, and another two 
in forgetting all that we had learned about them. 
There was now and then the formality of saying a 
lesson, but if you had not learned it, a brush across 
the shoulders (just enough to disturb a fly), was 
the sole remonstrance. Field never used the rod; 



94 FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

and in truth lie wielded tlie cane with no great 
good-will ^ — holding it "like a dancer." It looked 
in his hands rather like an emblem, than an instru- 
ment of authority; and an emblem, too, he was 
ashamed of. He was a good easy man, that did 
not care to ruffle his own peace, nor perhaps set 
any great consideration upon the value of juvenile 
time. He came among us now and then, but often 
stayed away whole days from us, and when he 
came, it made no difference to us — he had his pri- 
vate room to retire to, the short time he staid, to be 
out of the sound of our noise. Our mirth and 
uproar went on. We had classics of our own, with- 
out being beholden to " insolent Greece or haughty 
Rome," that passed current among us — Peter Wil- 
kins — the adventures of the Hon. Capt. Robert 
Boyle — the Fortunate Blue Coat Boy — and the 
like. Or we cultivated a turn for mechanic or 
scientific oj)erations ; making little sun-dials of 
paper; or weaving those ingenious parentheses, 
called cat-cradles; or making dry peas to dance 
upon the end of a tin pipe ; or studying the art 
military over that laudable game "French and 
English," — and a hundred other such devices to 
pass away the time — mixing the useful with the 
agreeable — as would have made the souls of Rous- 
seau and John Locke chuckle to have seen us. 

Matthew Field belonged to that class of modest 



FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 95 

divines who effect to mix in equal proportion the 
gentleman^ the scholar^ and the Christian ; but, I 
know not how, the first ingredient is generally 
found to be the predominating dose in the composi- 
tion. He was engaged in gay parties, or with his 
courtly bow at some Episcopal levee, when he should 
have been attending upon us. He had for many 
years the classical charge of a hundred children, 
during the four or five first years of their educa- 
tion ; and his very highest form seldom proceeded 
further than two or three of the introductory fables 
of Phsedrus. How things were suffered to go on 
thus, I cannot guess. Boyer, who was the proper 
person to have remedied these abuses, always effect- 
ed, perhaps felt, a delicacy in interfering in a prov- 
ince not strictly liis own. I have not been without 
my suspicions, that he was not altogether displeased 
at the contrast we presented to his end of the 
school. We were a sort of Helots to his young 
Spartans. He would sometimes, with ironic defer- 
ence, send to borrow a rod of the Under Master, 
and then, with Sardonic grin, observe to one of his 
upper boys, "how neat and fresh the twigs looked," 
While his j)ale students were battering their brains 
over Xenoj^hon and Plato, with a silence as deep as 
that enjoined by the Samite, we were enjoying our- 
selves at our ease in our little Goshen. We saw a 
little into the secrets of his discipline, and the pros- 



96 FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

pect did but tlie more reconcile us to our lot. His 
thunders rolled innocuous for us ; liis storms came 
near, but never touched us ; contrary to Gideon's 
miracle, while all around were drenched, our fleece 
was dry.* His boys turned out the better scholars ; 
we, I suspect, have the advantage in temper. His 
pupils cannot speak of him without something of 
terror, allaying their gratitude ; the remembrance 
of Field comes back with all the soothing images 
of indolence, and summer slumbers, and work like 
play, and innocent idleness, and Elysian exemp- 
tions, and life itself a " playing holyday." 

Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction 
of Boyer, we were near enough (as I have said) 
to understand a little of his system. We occasion- 
ally heard sounds of the Ululantes^ and caught 
glances of Tartarus. B. was a rabid pedant. His 
English style was crampt to barbarism. His Eas- 
ter Anthems (for his duty obliged him to those 
periodical flights) were grating as scrannel pipes.f 

* Cowley. 

t In this and every thing B. was the Antipodes of his co-adju- 
tor. While the former was digging l^s brains for crude anthems, 
M^orth a pig-nut, F. would be recreating his gentlemanly fancy in 
the more flowery walks of the Muses. A little dramatic effusion 
of his, under the name of Vei'tumnus and Pomona, is not yet 
forgotten by the chroniclers of that sort of literature. It was 
accepted by Garrick, but the town did not give it their sanction. 

B. used to say of it, in a way of half-compliment, half-irony, 

that it was too classical for 7'epresentation. 



FIVE AND THIKTY YEARS AGO. 97 

He would laugh, aye, and heartily, but then it must 

be at Flaccus's quibble about Rex or at the 

tristis severitas in vultu^ or inspicere in patinas^ 
of Terence — thin jests, which at their first broach- 
ing could hardly have had vis enough to move a 
Roman muscle. He had two wigs, both pedan- 
tic, but of differing omen. The one serene, smil- 
ing, fresh powdered, betokening a mild day. The 
other, an old discoloured, unkempt, angry caxon, 
denoting frequent and bloody execution. Woe to 
the school, when he made his morning appear- 
ance in his passy or passionate wig. No comet 

expounded surer. J. B. had a heavy hand. I 

have known him double his knotty fist at a poor 
trembling child (the maternal milk hardly dry 
upon its lips) with a "Sirrah, do you presume to 
set your wits at me ? " Nothing was more com- 
mon than to see him make a head-long entry into 
the school-room, from his inner recess, or library, 
and, with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar 
out, "Od's my life. Sirrah," (his favourite adjura- 
tion) "I have a great mind to whip you," — then, 
with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into 
his lair — and, after a cooling lapse of some min- 
utes (during which all but the culprit had totally 
forgotten the context) drive headlong out again, 
piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been 
some Devil's Litany, with the expletory yell — 



98 FIVE AND THIKTY YEAES AGO. 

" and I WILL tooT In liis gentler moods, when 

the rahidus furor was assuaged, he had resort 
to an ingenious method, peculiar, for what I have 
heard, to himself, of whipping the boy, and reading 
the Debates, at the same time ; a paragraph, and a 
lash between ; which in those times, when parlia- 
mentary oratory was most at a height and flourish- 
ing in these realms, was not calculated to impress 
the patient with a veneration for the diffuser graces 
of rhetoric. 

Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was known 
to fall ineffectual from his hand — when droll 
squinting W — having been caught putting the 
inside of the master's desk to a use for which the 
architect had clearly not designed it, to justify him- 
self, with great simplicity averred, that he did not 
Icnow that the thing had heen forewarned. This 
exquisite irrecognition of any law antecedent to the 
oral^ or declaratory^ struck so irresistibly upon the 
fancy of all who heard it (the pedagogue himself 
not excepted) that remission was imavoidable. 

L. has given credit to B.'s great merits as an 
instructor. Coleridge, in his literary life, has pro- 
nounced a more intelligible and ample encomium 
on them. The author of the Country Spectator 
doubts not to compare him with the ablest teachers 
of antiquity. Perhaps we cannot dismiss him bet- 
ter than with the pious ejaculation of C. — when he 



FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO - 99 

heard that his old master was on his death-bed — 
"Poor J. B! — may all his faults be forgiven; and 
may he be wafted to bhss by little cherub boys, all 
head and wings, with no hottoms to reproach his 
sublunary infirmities." 

Under him were many good and sound scholars 

l^red. First Grecian of my time was Lancelot 

Pepys Stevens, kindest of boys and men, since 
Co-grammar-master (and inseparable companion) 
with Dr. T— e. What an edifying spectacle did 
this brace of friends present to those who remem- 
bered the anti-socialities of their predecessors! 

You never met the one by chance in the street 
without a wonder, which was quickly dissipated by 
the ahnost immediate sub-appearance of the other. 
Generally arm in arm, these kindly coadjutors 
lightened for each other the toilsome duties of their 
profession, and when, in advanced age, one found it 
convenient to retire, the other was not long in dis- 
covering that it suited him to lay down the fasces 
also. O, it is pleasant, as it is rare, to find the 
same arm linked in yours at forty, which at thir- 
teen helped it to turn over the Cicero De Amicitia, 
or some tale of Antique Friendship, which the 
young heart even then was burning to anticipate ! 

Co-Grecian with S. was Th , who has since 

executed with ability various diplomatic functions 
at the Northern courts. Th was a tall dark 



10 FIVE AND THIETY YEARS AGO. 

saturnine youth, sparing of speech, with raven 

locks. Thomas Fanshaw MidcUeton followed him 

(now Bishop of Calcutta) a scholar and a gentle- 
man in his teens. He has the reputation of an 
excellent critic; and is author (besides the Coun- 
try Spectator,) of a Treatise on the Greek Article, 

against Sharpe. M. is said to bear his mitre 

high in India, where the regni novitas (I dare say) 
sufficiently justifies the bearing. A humility quite 
as primitive as that of Jewel or Hooker, might not 
be exactly fitted to impress the minds of those 
Anglo-Asiatic diocesans with a reverence for home 
institutions, and the church which those fathers 
watered. The manners of M. at school, though 

firm, were mild and unassuming. Next to M. 

(if not senior to him,) was Richards, author of the 
Aboriginal Britons, the most spirited of the Oxford 

Prize Poems ; a pale, studious Grecian. Then 

followed poor S , ill-fated M ! of these the 

Muse is silent. 

Finding some of Edward" s race 
Unhappy, pass their annals by. 

Come back into memory, like as thou wert m 
the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a 
fiery column before thee — the dark j)illar not 
yet turned. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Logician, 
Metaphysician, Bard ! — How have I seen the cas- 



FIVE AND THIKTY YEARS AGO. 101 

ual passer, through the Cloisters, stand still, in- 
tranced with admiration, (while he weighed the 
disproportion between the speech and the garh of 
the young Mirandula,) to hear thee unfold, in thy 
deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jam- 
blichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou 
waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts) or 
reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar — while 
the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the 
accents of the inspired charity-hoy I — " Many were 
the wit-combats," (to dally awhile with the words 

of old Fuller,) between him and C. Y. Le G , 

"which two I behold like a Spanish great gallion, 
and an English man of war ; Master Coleridge, like 
the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, 
but slow in his performances. C. V. L., with the 
English man of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in 
sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and 
take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his 
wit and invention." 

Nor shalt thou, their compeer, be quickly forgot- 
ten, Allen, with the cordial smile, and still more 
cordial laugh, with which thou wert wont to make 
the old Cloisters shake, in thy cognition of some 
poignant jest of theirs ; or the anticipation of some 
more material, and, peradventure, practical one, of 
thine own. Extinct are those smiles, with that 
beautiful countenance, with which (for thou wert 



102 FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

the Nireus formosus of the school,) in the days of 
thy maturer waggery, thou didst disarm the wrath 
of infuriated town-damsel, who, incensed by provok- 
ing pinch, turning tigress-like round, suddenly con- 
verted by thy angel-look, exchanged the half-formed 

terrible "5Z ," for a gentler greeting — ''■hless 

thy handsome face ! " 

Next follow two, who ought to be now alive, and 

the friends of Elia — the junior Le G and 

F ; who impelled, the former by a roving tem- 
per, the latter by too quick a sense of neglect — 
ill capable of enduring the slights poor Sizars are 
sometimes subject to in our seats of learning — 
exchanged their Alma Mater for the camp; per- 
ishing, one by climate, and one on the plains of 

Salamanca: — Le G , sanguine, volatile, sweet- 

natured; F dogged, faitliful, anticipative of 

insult, warm-hearted, with something of the old 
Roman height about him. 

Fine frank-hearted, Fr , the present master 

of Hertford, with Marmaduke T , mildest of 

Missionaries — and both my good friends still — 
close the catalogue of Grrecians in my time. 



FIYE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 103 



CHEIST'S HOSPITAL FIYE AND THIKTY 
YEARS AGO. 

PAGE 

81 — PuhlisTied a year or two since. The essay 
"On Christ's Hospital," etc., contributed to the 
Gentleman^ s MagarAne for June, 1813, was repub- 
lished with other of Lamb's prose and poetry, in 
1818. 

81 — His friends lived in town. The Lamb 
family were then living in the Temple. 

81 — Sub-treasurer. Randall Norris, referred 
to in a preceding essay. 

83 — The good old relative. In a letter written 
to Coleridge Jan. 5, 1797, Lamb refers to his aunt, 
then on her death-bed, "as the kindest, goodest 
creature to me when I was at school ; who used to 
toddle there to bring me good things, when I, 
school-boy like, only despised her for it, and used to 
be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on 
the old coal-hole steps as you went into the old 
grammar-school, and open her apron, and bring out 



104 FIVE AND THIETY TEAKS AGO. 

her bason, witli some nice thing she had caused to 
be saved for me." 

84 — Calne in Wiltshire. " One of Lamb's inno- 
cent mystifications." Coleridge, whose personality 
the writer assumes, was born at Ottery St. Mary's 
in Devonshire, but at one time lived at Calne. Va- 
rious autobiographical references in the Elian essays 
were so contradictory, that Lamb was called to 
account by many readers. Accordingly, in an amus- 
ing paper, "Elia to His Correspondents," he most 
ingeniously defends himself, concluding with these 
defiant words : " He [Elia] hath not so fixed his 
nativity (like a rusty vane) to one dull spot, but 
that, if he seeth occasion, or the argument shall 
demand it, he will be born again, in future papers, 
in whatever place, and at whatever period, shall 
seem good unto him." 

85 — X.'s governor. Lamb was really presented 
to the school by Timothy Yeates, one of the gov- 
ernors of the Hospital, who was doubtless influ- 
enced by Samuel Salt, here referred to. 

86 — H . " Hodges." — Key to Elia. 

87 — The nurses. Widows, who had charge of 
the boys' dormitories, saw to their washing, and 
carved for them at table. 

89 — Mr. Hathaway. "A thin, stiff man of 
invincible formality of demeanor, admirably fitted 
to render encroachment impossible." — Leigh Hunt. 



FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 105 

93 — Rev. James Boyer. " A short, stout man, 
inclining to punchiness, with large face and hands, 
an aquiline nose, long upper lip, and a sharp mouth. 
His eye was close and cruel. The spectacles which 
he wore threw a balm over it. Being a clergyman, 
he dressed in black, with a powdered wig. His 
clothes were cut short; his hands hung out of his 
sleeves, with tight wristbands, as if ready for exe- 
cution ; and as he generally wore grey worsted 
stockings, very tight, with a little balustrade leg, his 
whole appearance presented something formidably 
succinct, hard, mechanical." — Leigh Hunt. 

93 — Hev. Matthew Field. " A man of more 
handsome incompetence for his situation perhaps 
did not exist." — Leigh Hunt. 

94 — Wielded the cane. " Languidly bearing 
his cane, as if it were a lily .... When he 
condescended to hit us with the cane, he made a 
face as if he was taking physic." — Leigh Hunt. 

96 — Terror., allaying their gratitude. In the 
midst of the eulogy on Boyer, part of which is 
quoted on page 77, Coleridge confessed that in 
his advanced manhood he still dreamed of the 
school-master, who was the terror of his youth. 

98 — Author of the Country Spectator. Thomas 
Tanshawe Middleton, afterwards Archdeacon of 
Huntingdon, and first Bishop of Calcutta. He 
laid the foundation of the Bishop's College at Cal- 



106 FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

cutta, and establislied a consistory chapter in that 
city. 

98 — a Coleridge. 

99 — Lancelot Pepys Stevens. Under Gram- 
mar Master, when Leigh Hunt was at school. 
Hunt thus describes him : " Stevens was short and 
fat, with a handsome, cordial face. You loved him 
as you looked at him ; and seemed as if you should 
love him the more, the fatter he became." 

99 — Dr. T — e. Dr. TroUope, who succeeded 
to Boyer's position in 1799. 

99—7% . The Right Hon. Sir Edward 

Thornton, G. C. B., minister and ambassador to 
Sweden, Brazil and Portugal. 

100 — S . " Scott, died in Bedlam." — Key 

to Elia. 

100 — M . '^Maunde, dismissed school" — 

Ibid. 

100 — Samuel Taylor Coleridge. " Coleridge 
and Lamb were school-fellows for the whole seven 
years of the latter 's residence, and from this early 
association arose a friendship as memorable as any 
in English Literature." — Alfred Ainger. 

101 — C. V. Le G . Charles Valentine Le 

Grice, afterwards tutor, and rector of a CornwMl 
parish. 

102 — Junior Le G . Samuel Le Grice. 

Hunt says of him : " He was the maddest of all 



FIVE AND THIRTY YEARS AGO. 107 

the great boys in my time ; clever, full of address, 
and not hampered with modesty." Nevertheless, he 
was a warm friend, as he proved to Lamb at the 
time of Mrs. Lamb's death, when he devoted himseK 
day and night to the unfortunate family. 

102 — i^ . "Favell; left Cambrg because 

he was ashamed of his father, who was a house- 
painter there." — Key to Elia. 

102 — Exchanged their Alma Mater for the 
camp. While at College, these young men wrote 
to the Duke of York for commissions in the army, 
which were granted. 

102 — Fr . "Franklin, Gramr Mast., Hert- 
ford." — Key to Elia. 

102 — Ma.rmaduke T . Marmaduke Thomp- 
son, to whom Lamb dedicated the story of " Rosa- 
mund Gray." 



108 MY KELATIONS, 



MY EELATIONS. 

\London Magazine, June, 182 1.] 

Thou too art dead . . . very kind 
Hast thou been to me in my childish days, 
Thou best good creature. I have not forgot 
How thou didst love thy Charles, when he was yet 
A prating school-boy. 
Charles Lamb: Written on the Day of my Aitnfs Funeral. 

John, you were figuring in the gay career 
Of blooming manhood with a young man's joy, 
When I was yet a little peevish boy — 
Though time has made the difference disappear 
Betwixt our ages, which then seemed so great — 
And still by rightful custom you retain, 
Much of the old authoritative strain. 
And keep the elder brother up in state. 

— Charles Lamb : To John Lamb, Esq. 



MY RELATIONS. 109 



MY EELATIONS. 

I AM arrived at that point of life, at wMcli a 
man may account it a blessing, as it is a singu- 
larity, if lie have either of his parents surviving. 
I have not that felicity — and sometimes think feel- 
ino-ly of a passage in Browne's Christian Morals, 
where he speaks of a man that hath lived sixty or 
seventy years in the world. " In such a compass of 
time," he says, "a man may have a close appre- 
hension what it is to be forgotten, when he hath 
lived to find none who could remember his father, 
or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may sensi- 
bly see with what a face in no long time Oblivion 
will look upon himself." 

I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was 
one whom single blessedness had soured to the 
world. She often used to say, that I was the only 
thing in it which she loved ; and, when she thought 
I was quitting it, she grieved over me with mother's 
tears. A partiality quite so exclusive, my reason 
cannot altogether approve. She was from morning 



110 MY RELATIONS. 

till night poring over good books, and devotional 
exercises. Her favourite volumes were Thomas a 
Kempis, in Stanhope's translation; and a Roman 
Catholic Prayer Book, with the matins and com- 
plines regularly set down, — terms which I was at 
that time too young to understand. She persisted 
in reading them, although admonished daily con- 
cerning their Papistical tendency; and went to 
church every Sabbath, as a good Protestant should 
do. These were the only books she studied; 
though, I think, at one period of her life, she told 
me she had read with great satisfaction the Adven- 
tures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman. Find- 
ing the door of the chapel in Essex-street open one 
day — it was in the infancy of that heresy — she 
w^ent in, liked the sermon, and the manner of wor- 
ship, and frequented it at intervals for some time 
after. She came not for doctrinal points, and 
never missed them. With some little asperities in 
her constitution, which I have above hinted at, she 
was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine old 
Christian. She was a woman of strong sense, and 
a shrewd mind — extraordinary at a repartee^ one 
of the few occasions of her breaking silence — else 
she did not much value wit. The only secular 
employment I remember to have seen her engaged 
in, was, the splitting of French beans, and dropping 
them into a China basin of fair water. The odour 



MY RELATIONS. Ill 

of those tender vegetables to this day comes back 
upon my sense, redolent of soothing recollections. 
Certainly it is the most delicate of culinary 
operations. 

Male aunts, as somebody calls them, I had none 

to remember. By the uncles' side I may be said 

to have been born an orphan. Brother, or sister, I 
never had any — to know them. A sister, I think, 
that should have been Elizabeth, died in both our 
infancies. What a comfort, or what a care, may I 
not have missed in her! — But I have cousins, 
sprinkled about in Hertfordshire — besides two, 
with whom I have been all my life in habits of the 
closest intimacy, and whom I may term cousins par 
excellence. These are James and Bridget Elia. 
They are older than myself by twelve, and ten, 
years; and neither of them seems disposed, in 
matters of advice and guidance, to waive any of the 
prerogatives which primogeniture confers. May 
they continue still in the same mind; and when 
they shall be seventy-five, and seventy-three, years 
old (I cannot spare them sooner), persist in treat- 
ing me in my grand climacteric precisely as a 
stripling, or younger brother ! 

James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath 
her unities, which not every critic can penetrate ; 
or, if we feel, we cannot explain them. The pen of 
Yorick, and none since his, could have drawn J. E. 



112 MY RELATIONS. 

entire — those fine Shandian lights and shades, 
which make up his story. I must limp after in my 
poor antithetical manner, as the fates have given 
me grace" and talent. J. E. then — to the eye of a 
common observer at least — seemeth made up of 
contradictory principles. — The genuine child of 
impulse, the frigid philosopher of prudence — the 
phlegm of my cousin's doctrine is invariably at war 
with his temperament, which is high sanguine. 
With always some fire-new project in his brain, J. 
E. is the systematic opponent of innovation, and 
crier down of everything that has not stood the test 
of age and experiment. With a hundred fine 
notions chasing one another hourly in his fancy, he 
is startled at the least approach to the romantic 
in others; and, determined by his own sense in 
everything, commends you to the guidance of com- 
mon sense on all occasions. — With a touch of the 
eccentric in all which he does, or says, he is only 
anxious that you should not commit yourself by 
doing anything absurd or singular. On my once 
lettiiig slip at table, that I was not fond of a cer- 
tain popular dish, he begged me at any rate not to 
say so — for the world would think me mad. He 
disguises a passionate fondness for works of high 
art (whereof he hath amassed a choice collection), 
under the pretext of buying only to sell again — 
that his enthusiasm may give no encouragement to 



MY RELATIONS. ^^ 



yours. Yet, if it were so, wliy does that piece of 
tender, pastoral Domenicliino hang still by his 
wall?— is the ball of his sight much more dear to 
him'? — or what picture-dealer can talk like him? 

Whereas mankind in general are observed to 
warp their speculative conclusions to the bent of 
their individual humours, Us theories are sure to be 
in diametrical opposition to his constitution. He 
is courageous as Charles of Sweden, upon instmct; 
chary of his person, upon principle, as a travellmg 
Quaker. — He has been preachhig up to me, all my 
life, the doctrine of bowing to the great — the 
necessity of forms, and manner, to a man's getting 
on in the world. He himself never aims at either, 
that I can discover — and has. a spirit, that would 
stand upright in the presence of the Cham of 
Tartary. It is pleasant to hear him discourse ot 
patience — extolling it as the truest wisdom — and 
to see him during the last seven minutes that his 
dinner is getting ready. Nature never ran up m 
her haste a more restless piece of workmanship, 
than when she moulded this impetuous cousin — 
and Art never turned out a more elaborate orator 
than he can display himself to be, upon his favour- 
ite topic of the advantages of quiet, and contended- 
ness in the state, whatever it be, that we are placed 
in. He is triumphant on this theme, when he has 
you safe in one of those short stages that ply for 



/ 

114 MY RELATIONS. 

the western road, in a very obstructing manner, at 
the foot of John Murray's street — where you get 
in when it is empty, and are expected to wait till 
the vehicle hath completed her just freight — a 
trying three quarters of an hour to some people. 
He "wonders at your fidgetiness," — "where could 
we be better than we are, thus sitting^ thus con- 
sulting?^^ — "prefers, for his part, a state of rest to 
locomotion," — with an eye all the while upon the 
coachman — till at length, waxing out of all pa- 
tience, at your want of it^ he breaks out into a 
pathetic remonstrance at the fellow for detaining us 
so long over the time which he* had professed, and 
declares peremptorily that "the gentleman in the 
coach is determined to get out, if he does not 
drive on that instant." 

Very quick at inventing an argument, or detect- 
ing a sophistry, he is incapable of attending you in 
any chain of arguing. Indeed he makes wild work 
with logic ; and seems to jump at most admirable 
conclusions by some process, not at all akin to it. 
Consonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to 
deny, upon certain occasions, that there exists such 
a faculty at all in man, as reason ; and wondereth 
how man came first to have a conceit of it — 
enforcing his negation with all the might of rea- 
soning he is master of. He has some speculative 
notions against laughter, and will maintain that 



MY RELATIONS. 115 

laughing is not natural to Mm — when peradvent- 
ure the next moment his lungs shall crow like 
Chanticleer. He says some of the best things in 
the world — and declareth, that wit is his aversion. 
It was he who said, upon seeing the Eton boys at 
play in their grounds — What a pity to think, that 
these fine ingenuous lads in a few years will all he 
changed into frivolous Memhers of Parliament! 

His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous — and 
in age he discovereth no symptom of cooling. This 
is that which I admire in him. I hate people who 
meet Time half-way. I am for no compromise with 
that inevitable spoiler. While he lives J. E. will 
take his swing. — It does me good, as I walk 
towards the street of my daily avocation, on some 
fine May morning, to meet him marching in a quite 
opposite direction, with a jolly handsome presence, 
and shining sanguine face, that indicates some pur- 
chase in his eye — a Claude — or a Hobbima — 
for much of his enviable leisure is consumed at 
Christie's, and Phillips's — or where not — to pick 
up pictures, and such gauds. On these occasions 
he mostly stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on 
the advantage a person like me possesses above 
himself, in having his time occupied with business 
which he must do — assureth me that he often feels 
it hang heavy on his hands — wishes he had fewer 
holidays — and goes off — Westward Ho ! — chant- 



^.A 



116 MY KELATIONS. 

ing a tune, to Pall Mall — perfectly convinced, that 
he has convinced me — while I proceed in my 
opposite direction tuneless. 

It is pleasant again to see this Professor of 
Indifference doing the honours of his new purchase, 
when he has fairly housed it. You must view it 
in every light, till he has found the best — placing 
it at this distance, and at that, but always suiting 
the focus of your sight to his own. You must spy 
at it through your fingers, to catch the aerial per- 
spective — though you assure him that to you the 
landscape shows much more agreeable without that 
artifice. Woe be to the luckless wight, who does 
not only not respond to his rapture, but who should 
drop an unseasonable intimation of preferring one 
of his anterior bargains to the present ! — The last 
is always his best hit — his "Cynthia of the min- 
ute." — Alas ! how many a mild Madonna have I 
known to come in — a Raphael ! — keep its ascen- 
dency for a few brief moons — then, after certain 
intermedial degradations, from the front drawing 
room to the back gallery, thence to the dark par- 
lour, — adopted in turn by each of the Carracci, 
under successive lowering ascriptions of filiation, 
mildly breaking its fall — consigned to the oblivious 
lumber-room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or 
plain Carlo Maratti ! — which things when I beheld 
— musing upon the chances and mutabilities of fate 



MY KELATIONS. 117 

below, hath made me to reflect upon the altered 
condition of great personages, or that woeful Queen 
of Richard the Second — 

set forth in pomp, 

She came adorned hither like sweet May, 
Sent back like Hollo wmass or shortest day. 

With great love for you^ J. E. hath but a limited 
sympathy with what you feel, or do. He lives in a 
world of his own, and makes slender guesses at 
what passes in your mind. He never pierces the 
marrow of your habits. He will tell an old estab- 
lished playgoer, that Mr. Such-a-one, of So-and-so 
(naming one of the theatres), is a very lively come- 
dian — as a piece of news ! He advertised me but 
the other day of some pleasant green lanes which 
he had found out for me, hiowing me to he a great 
luallcer^ in my own immediate vicinity — who have 
haunted the identical spot any time these twenty 
years ! — He has not much respect for that class of 
feelings, which goes by the name of sentimental. 
He applies the definition of real evil to bodily 
sufferings exclusively — and rejecteth all others, as 
imaginary. He is affected by the sight, or the bare 
supposition, of a creature in pain, to a degree which 
I have never witnessed out of womankind. A con- 
stitutional acuteness to this class of sufferings may 



118 MY RELATIONS 

in part account for this. Tlie animal tribe in par- 
ticular lie taketh under his especial protection. 
A broken-winded or spur-galled horse is sure to 
find an advocate in him. An over-loaded ass is his 
client for ever. He is the apostle to the brute kind 
— the never-failing friend of those who have none 
to care for them. The contemplation of a lobster 
boiled, or eels skinned alive, will wring him so, that 
"all for pity he could die." It will take the 
savour from his palate, and the rest from his pillow, 
for days and nights. With the intense feeling of 
Thomas Clarkson, he wanted only the steadiness 
of pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that "true yoke- 
fellow with Time," to have affected as much for the 
Animal, as he hath done for the Negro Creation. 
But my uncontrollable cousin is but imperfectly 
formed for purposes which demand co-operation. 
He cannot wait. His amelioration-plans must be 
ripened in a day. For this reason he has cut but 
an equivocal figure in benevolent societies, and com- 
binations for the alleviation of human sufferings. 
His zeal constantly makes him to outrun, and put 
out, his co-adjutors. He thinks of relieving, — 
while they think of debating. He was black-balled 
out of a society for the Relief of ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ .^, 
^ ^ ^ ^ , because the fervour of his humanity 
toiled beyond the formal apprehension, and creep- 
ing processes, of his associates. I shall always con- 



MY RELATIONS. 119 

sider this distinction as a patent of nobility in the 
Elia family ! 

Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to 
smile at, or upbraid, my unique cousin? Marry! 
heaven, and all good manners, and the understand- 
ing that should be between kinsfolk, forbid ! — 
With all the strangenesses of this strangest of the 
Elias — I would not have him in one jot or tittle 
other than he is ; neither would I barter or 
exchange my wild kinsman for the most exact, reg- 
ular, and e very-way-consistent kinsman breathing. 

In my niext, reader, I may perhaps give you 
some account of my cousin Bridget — if you are not 
already surfeited with cousins — and take you by 
the hand, if you are willing to go with us, on an 
excursion which we made a summer or two since, in 
search of more cousins — 

. Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. 

Till when. Farewell. 



\ ' 



120 mV kelations. 



t' 



MY EEfiifiONS. 

[Perhaps nothing better illustrates Charles Lamb's gentle 
unselfishness than his untiring devotion to his brother. In spite 
of the fact that John was selfish, domineering,- unsympathetic, 
and unappreciative, the younger brother never ceased to love 
and admire him. Little good can be learned of John Lamb, 
except from the pen of his brother, and even that testimony, 
to those vi^ho, knowing the personal histories of the two men, 
read between the lines, seems a pitiful attempt to present in 
pleasing light that which is, of itself, not pleasing. Although 
John Lamb held a clerkship at the South Sea House, received 
a good salary, and was without family encumbrances, he never- 
theless seems to have contributed nothing to the support of his 
imbecile father and deranged sister, and to have opposed rather 
than aided Charles in his heroic efforts to provide for the 
unfortunate family. Yet Charles could overlook this, and in 
a letter to Coleridge, directly after the terrible tragedy, wrote: 
"Let me not leave one unfavorable impression on your mind 
respecting my brother. Since this happened, he has been very 
kind and brotherly; but I fear for his mind; he has taken his 
ease in the world, and is not fit himself to struggle with difficul- 
ties, nor has much accustomed himself to throw himself into 
their way ; and I know his language is already, ' Charles, you 
must take care of yourself; you must not abridge yourself of 
a single pleasure you have been used to,' &c., &c., and in that 



MY RELATIONS. 121 

style of talking. But you, a Necessarian, can respect a differ- 
ence of mind, and love what is amiable in a character not perfect. 
He has been very good ; but I fear for his mind." E. D. H.] 

PAGE 

109 — Aunt. This was liis father's sister, who 
lived for many years with the Lamb family, not 
always on the pleasantest terms with the adult 
members. 

110 — JEssex-street. In Essex-street was the 
chapel and residence of Theophilus Lindsey, the 
first pastor of the first professedly Unitarian church 
in London. On the same site is now the build- 
ing used as the head-quarters of the British and 
Foreign Unitarian Association. 

111 — ElizahetJi. The Register of Baptism in 
the Temple Church records seven children born to 
John and Elizabeth Lamb, of whom the fifth was 
Elizabeth, born August 30, 1768. 

Ill — James and Bridget Elia. Signifying, of 
course, John and Mary Lamb. A large part of 
the charm of the Elian essays lies in the many lov- 
ing, humorous, and pathetic allusions to Bridget 
Elia. 

111 — Pen of Yorich, "Yorick" was the pseu- 
donym under which Laurance Sterne published his 
" Sentimental Journey." 

112 — A touch of the eccentric. John Lamb 



122 MY EELATIONS. 

did not escape his share of the family tendency to 
insanity. 

115 — Opposite direction. " We feel that the 
picture needs no additional touches, ' Marching in a 
quite opposite direction ' was what John Lamb con- 
tinued to do, in all respects, as concerned the duti- 
ful and home-keeping members of his family." — 
Alfred Ainger. 

117 — A limited sympathy. "If not rude, he 
[John Lamb] was sometimes, indeed generally, 
abrupt and unprepossessing in manner. He was 
assuredly deficient in that courtesy which usually 
springs from a mind at friendship with the world." 
— Bryan Haller Procter. 

118 — * **^****** "Distrest 
Sailors." — Key to JElia. 

119 — Green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. 
The closing line of a sonnet, unpublished during 
Lamb's life. As it is found in few of the editions 
of his works, we give it entire ; 



" The Lord of Life shakes off his drowsihed, 
And 'gins to sprinkle on the earth below 
Those rays that from his shaken locks do flow; 
Meantime, by truant love of rambling led, 
I turn my back on thy deserted walls, 
Proud city ! and thy sons I leave behind, 
A sordid, selfish, money-getting kind ; 
Brute things who shut their ears when Freedom calls. 



MY RELATIONS. 123 

I pass not thee so lightly, well known spire, 
That minded me of many a pleasure gone, 
Of merrier days of love and Islington ; 
Kindling afresh the pleasures of past desire. 
And I shall muse on that slow journeying on 
To the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire." 



124 MACKERY END. 



MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. 

[London Magazine, July, 1821.] 

Miss Lamb would have been remarkable for the 
sweetness of her disposition, the clearness of her 
understanding, and the gentle wisdom of all her 
acts and words, even if these qualities had not been 
presented in marvellous contrast with the distrac- 
tion under which she suffered for weeks, latterly for 
months, in every year In all its essen- 
tial sweetness, her character was like her brother's; 
while, by a temper more placid, a spirit of enjoy- 
ment more serene, she was enabled to guide, to 

counsel, to cheer him To a friend in 

any difficulty she was the most comfortable of 
advisers, the wisest of consolers. Hazlitt used to 
say, that he never met with a woman who could 
reason, and had met with only one thoroughly 
reasonable — the sole exception being Mary Lamb. 

— Thomas Noon Talfourd. 



MACKERY END. 125 



MACKEKY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE. 

Bridget Elia has been my housekeeper for 
many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget, 
extending beyond the period of memory. We 
house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of 
double singleness ; with such tolerable comfort, 
upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no 
sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, 
with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celib- 
acy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and 
habits — yet so, as "with a difference." We are 
generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings — 
as it should he among near relations. Our sym- 
pathies are rather understood, than expressed; and 
once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more 
kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and 
complained that I was altered. We are both great 
readers in different directions. While I am hang- 
ing over (for the thousandth time) some passage in 
old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, 



126 MACKERY END. 

slie is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, 
whereof our common reading- table is daily fed witb 
assiduously fresb supplies. Narrative teazes me. 
I have little concern in the progress of events. 
She must have a story — well, ill, or indifferently 
told — so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of 
good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune 
in fiction — and almost in real life — have ceased to 
interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of- 
the-way humours and opinions — heads with some 
diverting twist in them — the oddities of authorship 
please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish 
of any thing that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing 
goes down with her, that is quaint, irregular, or out 
of the road of common sympathy. She "holds 
Nature more clever." I can pardon her blindness 
to the beautiful obliquities of the Eeligio Medici; 
but she must apologize to me for certain disrespect- 
ful insinuations, which she has been pleased to 
throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals of a 
dear favourite of mine, of the last century but one 
■ — the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, — but 
again somewhat fantastical, and original-brain'd, 
generous Margaret Newcastle. 

It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps 
than I could have wished, to have had for her asso- 
ciates and mine, free-thinkers — leaders, and disci- 
ples, of novel philosophies and systems ; but she 



MACKERY END. 127 

neither wrangles with, nor accepts, their opinions. 
That which was good -and venerable to her, when 
she was a child, retains its authority over her mind 
still. She never juggles or plays tricks with her 
understanding. 

We are both of us inclined to be a little too pos- 
itive; and I have observed the result of our dis- 
putes to be almost uniformly this — that in matters 
of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out, that 
I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. 
But where we have differed upon moral points ; 
upon something proper to be done, or let alone ; 
whatever heat of opposition, or steadiness of convic- 
tion, I set out with, I am sure always in the long 
run, to be brought over to her way of thinking. 

I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman 
with a gentle hand, for Bridget does not like to be 
told of her faults. She hath an aukward trick, 
(to say no worse of it) of reading in company: at 
which times she will answer yes or no to a question, 
without fully understanding its purport — which is 
provoking, and derogatory in the highest degree to 
the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her 
presence of mind is equal to the most pressing 
trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon 
trifling occasions. When the purpose requires it, 
and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it 
greatly ; but in matters which are not stuff of the 



128 MACKERY END. 

conscience, she hatli been known sometimes to let 
slip a word less seasonably. 

Her education in youtli was not much attended 
to ; and she happily missed all that train of female 
garniture, which passeth by the name of accom- 
plishments. She was tumbled early, by accident or 
design, into a spacious closet of good old English 
reading, without much selection or prohibition, and 
browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome 
pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they should be 
brought up exactly in this fashion. I know not 
whether their chance in wedlock might not be 
diminished by it ; but I can answer for it, that it 
makes (if the worst come to the worst) most incom- 
parable old maids. 

In a season of distress, she is the truest com- 
forter; but in the teazing accidents, and minor 
perplexities, which do not call out the will to meet 
them, she sometimes maketh matters worse by an 
excess of participation. If she does not always 
divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions 
of life she is sure always to treble your satisfaction. 
She is excellent to be at a play with, or upon a 
visit ; but best, when she goes a journey with you. 

We made an excursion together a few summers 
since, into Hertfordshire, to beat up the quarters of 
some of our less-known relations in that fine corn 
country. 



MACKERY END. 129 

The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End; 
or Mackarel End, as it is spelt, perhaps more prop- 
erly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire; a farm- 
house, — delightfully situated within a gentle walk 
from Wheathampstead. I can just remember hav- 
ing been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I 
was a child, under the care of Bridget; who, as I 
have said, is older than myself by some ten years. 
I wish that I could throw into a heaj) the remain- 
der of our joint existences^ that we might share 
them in equal division. But that is impossible. 
The house was at that time in the occupation of a 
substantial yeoman, who had married my grand- 
mother's sister. His name was Gladman. My 
grandmother was a Bruton, married to a Field. 
The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing 
in that part of the country, but the Fields are 
almost extinct. More than forty years had elapsed 
since the visit I speak of; and, for the greater por- 
tion of that period, we had lost sight of the other 
two branches also. Who, or what sort of persons, 
inherited Mackery End — kindred or strange folk 
— we were afraid almost to conjecture, but deter- 
mined some day to explore. 

By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble 
park at Luton in our way from Saint Alban's, we 
arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about 
noon. The sight of the old farm-house, though 



130 MACKERY END. 

every trace of it was effaced from my recollection, 
affected me with a pleasure wliicli I had not expe- 
rienced for many a year. For though I had for- 
gotten it, we had never forgotten being there 
together, and we had been talking about Mackery 
End all our lives, till memory on my part became 
mocked with a phantom of itself, and I thought I 
knew the aspect of a place, which, when present, 
O how unlike it was to ihat^ which 1 had conjured 
up so many times instead of it 1 

Still the air breathed balmily about it ; the sea- 
son was in the "heart of June," and I could say 
with the poet. 

But thou, that didst appear so fair 

To fond imagination, 
Dost rival in the light of day 

Her delicate creation ! * 

Bridget's was more a waking bliss than mine, for 
she easily remembered her old acquaintance again 
— some altered features, of course, a little grudged 
at. At first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for 
joy; but the scene soon re-confirmed itself in her 
affections — and she traversed every out-post of the 
old mansion, to the wood-house, the orchard, the 
place where the pigeon-house had stood (house and 
birds were alike flown) — with a breathless impa- 

* Wordsworth, on Yarrow Visited. 



MACKERY END. 131 

tience of recognition, which was more pardonable 
perhaps than decorous, at the age of fifty odd. 
But Bridget in some things is behind her years. 

The only thing left was to get into the house — 
and that was a difficulty, which to me singly would 
have been insurmountable ; for I am terribly shy in 
making myself known to strangers and out-of-date 
kinsfolk. Love, stronger than scruple, winged my 
cousin in without me ; but she soon returned with 
a creature, that might have sat to a sculptor for 
the image of Welcome. It was the youngest of the 
Gladmans ; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had 
become mistress of the old mansion. A comely 
brood are the Brutons. Six of them, females, were 
noted as the handsomest young women in the 
county. But this adopted Bruton^ in my mind, was 
better than they all ^ more comely. She was born 
too late to have remembered me. She just recol- 
lected in early life to have had her cousin Bridget 
once pointed out to her, climbing a stile. But the 
name of kindred, and of cousinship, was enough. 
Those slender ties, that prove slight as gossamer 
in the rending atmosphere of a metropolis, bind 
faster, as we found it, in hearty, homely, loving 
Hertfordshire, In five minutes we were as thor- 
oughly acquainted, as if we had been born and 
bred up together ; were familiar, even to the calling 
each other by our Christian names. So Chris- 



132 MACKERY END. 

tians should call one another. To have seen 
Bridget, and her — it was like the meeting of the 
two Scriptural cousins ! There was a grace and 
dignity, an amplitude of form and stature, answer- 
ing to her mind, in this farmer's wife, which would 
have shined in a palace — or so we thought it. 
We were made welcome by husband and wife 
equally — we, and our friend that was with us. — I 
had almost forgotten him — but B. F. will not so 
soon forget that meeting, if peradventure he shall 
read this on the far-distant shores where the Kan- 
garoo haunts The fatted calf was made ready, or 
rather was already so, as if in anticipation of our 
coming; and, after an appropriate glass of native 
wine, never let me forget, with what honest pride 
this hospitable cousin made us proceed to Wheat- 
hampstead, to introduce us (as some new-found 
rarity) to her mother and sister Gladmans, who 
did indeed know something more of us, at a time 
when she almost knew nothing. — With what corre- 
sponding kindness we were received by them also — 
how Bridget's memory, exalted by the occasion, 
warmed into a thousand half obliterated recollec- 
tions of things and persons, to my utter aston- 
ishment, and her own — and to the astoundment of 
B. F. who sat by, almost the only thing that icas 
not a cousin there, — old effaced images of more 
than half-forgotten names and circumstances still 



MACKERY END. 133 

crowding back upon her, as words written in lemon 
come out upon exposure to a friendly warmth^ — 
when I forget all this, then may my country cous- 
-ins forget me; and Bridget no more remember, 
that in the days of weakling infancy I was her 
tender charge — as I have been her care in foolish 
manhood since — in those pretty pastoral walks, 
long ago, about Mackery End, in Hertfordshire. 



134 MACKERY END. 



MACKEEY END, IN HERTFOEDSHIRE. 

PAGE 

125 — Hash hinges offspring. A rather con- 
torted allusion to Jephthah's daughter. 

125 — We are generally in Jiarmony. Mary 
Lamb once wrote to a friend, " I make it a point 
of conscience never to interfere or cross my brother 
in the humor he happens to be in." 

125 — Old Burton., or one of Ms strange con- 
temporaries. Concerning Lamb's peculiarities of 
taste, Mr. Thomas Westwood says: ''Charles Lamb 
was a living anachronism — a seventeenth century 
man, mislaid and brought to light two hundred 

years too late He belonged to the 

school of his contemporaries, but they were con- 
temporaries that never met him in the streets, but 
were mostly to be found in Poets' Corner, or under 
other grave-stones of the long ago." 

126 — Narrative teazes me. "Lamb never pos- 
sessed the faculty of constructing a plot either for 



MACKEEY END. 135 

drama or novel ; and while lie luxuriated in the 
humor of SmoUet, the wit of Fielding, or the sol- 
emn pathos of Richardson, he was not amused, but 
perplexed, by the attempt to tread the windings of 
story which conducts to their most exquisite pas- 
sages through the mazes of adventures." — Thomas 
Noon Talfourd. 

126 — Rdigio Medici. Lamb used to boast 
that he first "amongst the moderns" discovered 
and proclaimed the excellencies of Sir Thomas 
Browne ; and no author is more frequently quoted 
or alluded to in the Essays of Elia. 

126 — Margaret Newcastle. It was among 
Lamb's idiosyncracies to admire the works of Mar- 
garet Cavenish, Duchess of Newcastle, a prolific 
and amusing writer, of the seventeenth century. 
Her works are " remarkable for absurdity and bad 
grammar," says one critic; she possessed "not one 
particle of judgment or taste," adds another; 
while Horace Walpole describes her as a "fertile 
pedant, with an unbounded passion for scribbling." 

127 — Trials of life. During one of Mary's 
frequent illnesses. Lamb wrote thus to Miss Words- 
worth : " All my strength is gone, and I am like a 
fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, 
lest I should think wrong ; so used am I to look up 
to her in the least and biggest perplexity. . . . 
She is older and wiser and better than I, and all 



136 MACKEEY END. 

jnj wretched imperfections I cover to myself by 
resolutely thinking on her goodness." 

128 — Spacious closet of * * , reading. 
Samuel Salt's library, in the Inner Temple. 

128 — An excursion. Hardly a year passed 
without a similar expedition, and many of these are 
commemorated in the Elian Essays. 

132 — B. F. Barron Field, a friend since 
school-days. 

132 — Shores ichere the Kangaroo haunts. 
Field had at that time removed to Sydney, New 
South Wales, where Lamb addressed to him the 
fantastic "Letter to Distant Correspondents." 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 137 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 

[London Magazine, September, 1824.] 

There are few of his papers in which the past 
years of his life are more delightfully revived. 
The house had been "reduced to an antiquity." 
But we go with him to the grass plat, where he 
used to read Cowley; to the tapestried bedrooms 
where the mythological people of Ovid used to 
stand forth, half alive; even to "that haunted bed- 
room in which old Sarah Battle died," and into 
which he "used to creep in a passion of fear." 
These things are all touched with a delicate pen; 
mixed and incorporated with tender reflections; 
for " The solitude of childhood " (as he says) " is not 
so much the mother of thought as the feeder of 
love." With him it was both. 

— Bryan Waller Procter, 



138 BLAKESMOOE IN H SHIKE. 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 

I DO not know a pleasure more affecting than to 
range at will over the deserted apartments of some 
fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct 
grandeur admit of a better passion than envy ; and 
contemplations on the great and good, whom we 
fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, 
weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle 
of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish pres- 
ent aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I 
think, attends us between entering an empty and a 
crowded church. In the latter it is chance but 
some present human frailty — an act of inattention 
on the part of some of the auditory — or a trait of 
affectation, or worse, vain-glory, on that of the 
preacher — puts us by our best thoughts, dishar- 
monising the place and the occasion. But wouldst 
thou know the beauty of holiness? — go alone on 
some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master 
Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 139 

church — think of the piety that has kneeled there 
— the congregations, old and young, that have 
found consolation there — the meek pastor — the 
docile parishioner — with no disturbing emotions, 
no cross conflicting comparisons — drink in the 
tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as 
fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that 
kneel and weep around thee. 

Journeying northward lately, I could not resist 
going some few miles out of my road, to look upon 
the remains of an old great house with which I had 
been impressed in this way in infancy. I was 
apprized that the owner of it had lately pulled 
it down; still I had a vague notion that it could 
not all have perished, that so much solidity with 
magnificence could not have been crushed all at 
once into the mere dust and rubbish which I found 
it. 

The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift 
hand indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks 
had reduced it to — an antiquity. 

I was astonished at the indistinction of every- 
thing. Where had stood the great gates? What 
bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the out- 
houses commence ? a few bricks only lay as repre- 
sentatives of that which was so stately and so 
spacious. 

Death does not shrink up his human victim at 



140 BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 

this rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more 
in their porportion. 

Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at 
their process of destruction, at the plucking of 
every pannel I should have felt the varlets at my 
heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a 
plank at least out of the cheerful store-room, in 
whose hot-window seat I used to sit, and read Cow- 
ley, with the grass-plat before, and the hum and 
flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted 
it, about me — it is in mine ears now, as oft as 
summer returns — or a pannel of the yellow room. 

Why, every plank and pannel of that house for 
me had magic in it. The tapestried bed-rooms — 
tapestry so much better than painting — not adorn- 
ing merely, but peopling the wainscots — at which 
childhood ever and anon would steal and look, 
shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to 
exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye- 
encounter with those stern bright visages, staring 
reciprocally — all Ovid on the walls, in colours 
vivider than his descriptions. Actaeon in mid 
sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; 
and the still more provoking, and almost culinary 
coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately 
divesting of Marsyas. 

Then, that haunted room — in which old Mrs. 
Battle died — whereinto 1 have crept, but always 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIEE. 141 

in the day-time, with a passion of fear; and a 
sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold commu- 
nication with the past. — How shall they build it 
up again f 

It was an old deserted place, yet not so long 
deserted but that traces of the splendour of past 
inmates were everywhere apparent. Its furniture 
was still standing — even to the tarnished gilt 
leather battledores, and crumbling feathers of shut- 
tlecocks, in the nursery, which told that children 
had once played there. But I was a lonely child, 
and had the range at will of every apartment, 
knew every nook and corner, wondered and wor- 
shipped everywhere. 

The solitude of childhood is not so much the 
mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and 
silence, and admiration. So strange a passion for 
the place possessed me in those years, that, though 
there lay — I shame to say how few roods distant 
from the mansion — half hid by trees, what I 
judged some romantic lake — such was the spell 
which bound me to the house, and such my care- 
fulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, 
that the idle waters lay unexplored for me ; and 
not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder 
devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty 
brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of 
my infancy. Variegated views, extensive pros- 



142 BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 

pects — and those at no great distance from the 
house — I was told of such — what were they to 
me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden ? — 
So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, 
methought, still closer the fences of my chosen 
prison; and have been hemmed in by a yet 
securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. 
I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving 
poet — 

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines j 
Curl me about, ye gadding vines ; 
And oh so close your circles lace, 
That I may never leave this place : 
But, lest your fetters prove too weak, 
Ere I your silken bondage break. 
Do you, O brambles, chain me too. 
And, courteous briars, nail me through.* 

I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides 
— the low-built roof — parlours ten feet by ten — 
frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home — 
these were the condition of my birth — the whole- 
some soil which I was planted in. Yet, without 
impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not 
sorry to have had glances of something beyond; 
and to have taken if but a peep, in childhood, at 
the contrasting accidents of a great fortune. 

*Marvell, on Appleton House, to the Lord Fairfax. 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIEE. 143 

To have tlie feeling of gentility, it is not neces- 
sary to have been born gentle. The pride of ances- 
try may be had on cheaper terms than to be 
obliged to an importunate race of ancestors; and 
the coat-less antiquary, in his unemblazoned cell, 
revolving the long line of a Mowbray's or De Clif- 
ford's pedigree ^ — at those sounding names may 
warm himself into as gay a vanity as those who 
do inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal 
merely: and what herald shall go about to strip 
me of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords? 
can it be hacked off as a spur can? or torn away 
like a tarnished garter? 

What, else, were the families of the great to us? 
what pleasure should we take in their tedious 
genealogies, or their capitulatory brass monuments? 
What to us the uninterrupted current of their 
bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a 
cognate and correspondent elevation? 

Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished 
'Scutcheon — that hung upon the time-worn walls 
of thy princely stairs, Blakesmoor ! — have I in 
childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic 
characters — thy emblematic supporters, with their 
prophetic "Eesurgam" — till, every dreg of peas- 
antry purging off, I received into myself Very Gen- 
tility? — Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and, 
of nights, hast detained my steps from bedward, 



144 BLAKESMOOK IN H SHIEE. 

till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dream- 
ing on tliee. 

This is the only true gentry by adoption; the 
veritable change of blood, and not, as empirics have 
fabled, by transfusion. 

Who it was by dying that had earned the splen- 
did trophy, I know not, I inquired not; but its 
fading rags, and colours cobweb-stained, told, that 
its subject was of two centuries back. 

And what if my ancestor at that date was some 
Damoetas — feeding flocks, not his own, upon the 
hills of Lincoln — did I in less earnest vindicate 
to myself the family trappings of this once proud 
^gon ? — repaying by a. backward triumph the 
insults he might possibly have heaped in his life- 
time upon my poor pastoral progenitor. 

If it were presumption so to speculate, the pres- 
ent owners of the mansion had least reason to com- 
plain. They had long forsaken the old house of 
their fathers for a newer trifle ; and I was left to 
appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, 
to raise my fancy, or to soothe my vanity. 

I was the true descendent of those old W s ; 

and not the present family of that name, who had 
fled the old waste places. 

Mine was that gallery of good old family por- 
traits, which as I have traversed, giving them in 
fancy my own family name, one — and then an- 



BLAKESMOOK IN H SHIRE. 145 

otlier — would seem to smile, reaching forward from 
the canvas, to recognise the new relationship ; while 
the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the vacancy 
in their dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity. 

That Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, 
and a lamb — that hung next the great bay window 

— with the bright yellow H shire hair, and eye 

of watchet hue — so like my Alice! — I am per- 
suaded, she was a true Elia — Mildred Elia, I take 
it. 

From her, and from my passion for her — for I 
first learned love from a picture — Bridget took 
the hint of those pretty whimsical lines, which thou 
mayest see, if haply thou hast never seen them, 
Reader, in the margin.* But my Mildred grew 
not old, like the imaginary Helen. 

* " High-born Helen, round your dwelling 
These twenty years I've paced in vain : 
Haughty beauty, thy lover's duty 
Hath been to glory in his pain. 

, High-born Helen, proudly telling 

Stories of thy cold disdain ; 
I starve, I die, now you comply, 
And I no longer can complain. 

These twenty years I've lived on tears, 

Dwelling for ever on a frown ; 
On sighs I've fed, your scorn my bread ; 

And I perish now you kind are grown. 



146 BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 

Mine too, Blakesmoor, was tliy noble Marble 
Hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve 
Caesars — stately busts in marble — ranged round : 
of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I 
was, the frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had 
most of my wonder, but the mild Galba had my 
love. There they stood in the coldness of death, 
yet freshness of immortality. 

Mine too thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one 
chair of authority, high-backed, and wickered, once 
the terror of luckless poacher, or self-forgetful 
maiden — so common since, that bats have roosted 
in it. 

Mine too — whose else ? — thy costly fruit-garden, 
with its sun-baked southern wall ; the ampler pleas- 
ure-garden, rising backwards from the house, in 

Can I, who loved my beloved 

But for the scorn ' was in her eye *, 
Can I be moved for my beloved, 

When she returns me sigh for sigh ? 

In stately pride, by my bed-side, 

High-born Helen's portrait hung; 
Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays 

Are nightly to the portrait sung. 

To that I weep, nor ever sleep. 

Complaining all night long to her," — 

Helen, grown old, no longer cold. 
Said — "you to all men T prefer." 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 147 

triple terraces, witli flower-pots now of palest lead, 
save tliat a speck here and there, saved from the 
elements, bespake their pristine state to have been 
gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters back- 
warder still; and, stretching still beyond, in old 
formality, thy firry wilderness, the haunt of the 
squirrel, and the day-long murmuring woodpigeon 
— with that antique image in the centre, God or 
Goddess I wist not; but child of Athens or old 
Rome paid never a sincerer worship to Pan or to 
Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that 
fragmental mystery. 

Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands 
too frevently in your idol worship, walks and wind- 
ings of Blakesmoor! for this, or what sin of 
mine, has the plough passed over your pleasant 
places? I sometimes think that as men, when they 
die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habita- 
tions there may be a hope — a germ to be revivified. 



148 BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 

[The house here described was, as Mr. P. G. Patmore first 
pointed out, Gilston Park, the seat of Mr. Robert Plumer Ward, 
the eminent statesman and novelist. Here Lamb's maternal 
grandmother had for years been housekeeper, and here he had 
often visited her. The destruction described in this essay is 
exaggerated, the account given in " Dream Children " being 
more accurate. Mr. P. G. Patmore says, " When I first became 
acquainted with it (in 1831) nothing could be more perfect of 
its kind ; and so it remains to the present day. In fact, on com- 
ing into possession of it, by his marriage with its widowed 
owner, Mr. Plumer Ward had restored it in every part and par- 
ticular, with a scrupulous attention to its pristine character." 
This, however, was in 1831, and the visit here mentioned, 
according to Mr. Procter, was made in 1799, at which time the 
house was doubtless in a dilapidated condition. E. D. H.] 

PAGE 

144 — My ancestor. In Lamb's sonnet on 
" The Family Name," are these lines : 

" Perchance some shepherd on Lincolnian plains, 
In manners guileless as his own sweet flocks, 
Received thee first amid the merry mocks 
And arch allusions of his fellow swains." 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 149 

144 — A newer trifle. Blakesware, the seat of 
Mr. Ward, situated but a few miles from Gilston. 

144 -—TT s. Wards. 

145 — That Beauty. In his description of 
Gilston, Mr. Ward notices a portrait of the Count- 
ess of Abercorn, as a shepherdess, which hung in 
the dining room. Mrs. Plumer Ward was a grand- 
daughter of the Countess of Abercorn. 

145 — My Alice: See notes on "Dream Chil- 
dren." 



150 DREAM CHILDEEM. 



DEEAM CHILDKEN; A EEYEEIE. 

[London Magazine, January, 1822.] 

This essay appeared in the London Magazine 
for January, 1822. Lamb's elder brother John 

was then lately dead The death o£ 

this brother, wholly unsympathetic as he was with 
Charles, served to bring home to him his loneliness. 
He was left in the world with but one near rela- 
tive, and that one too often removed from him for 
months at a time by the saddest of afflictions. No 
wonder if he became keenly aware of his solitude. 
No wonder if his thoughts turned to what migJit 
have been, and he looked back to those boyish days 
when he wandered in the glades of Blakesware 

with Alice by his side Inexpressibly 

touching, when we have once learned to penetrate 
the thin disguise in which he clothes them, are the 
hoarded memories, the tender regrets, which Lamb, 
writing by his "lonely hearth," thus ventured to 



DREAM CHILDREN. 151 

commit to tlie uncertain sympathies of tlie great 
public. More touching still is the almost super- 
human sweetness with which he deals with the 
character of his lately lost brother. . . . And 
there is something of the magic of genius, unless, 
indeed, it was a burst of uncontrollable anguish, in 
the revelation with, which his dream ends. 

— Alfred Ainger, 



152 DREAM CHILDREN. 



DEEAM CHILDEEN; A EEYERIE. 

Children love to listen to stories about their 
elders, when they were children ; to stretch their 
imagination to the conception of a traditionary 
great-uncle, or grandame, whom they never saw. 
It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about 
me the other evening to hear about their great- 
grandmother Eield, who lived in a great house in 
Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in 
which they and Papa lived) which had been the 
scene — so at least it was generally believed in 
that part of the country — of the tragic incidents 
which they had lately become familiar with from 
the ballad of the Children in the Wood. Certain 
it is that the whole story of the children and their 
cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in 
wood upon the chimney-piece of the great hall, the 
whole story down to the Eobin Eedbreasts, till a 
foolish rich person pulled it down to set up a 
marble one of modern invention in its .stead, with 



DEE AM CHILDREN. 153 

no story upon it. Here Alice put out one of 
lier dear mother's looks, too tender to be called 
upbraiding. Then I went on to say, how religious 
and how good their great-grandmother Field was, 
how beloved and respected by every body, though 
she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, 
but had only the charge of it (and yet in some 
respects she might be said to be the mistress of it 
too) committed to her by the owner, who preferred 
living in a newer and more fashionable mansion 
which he had purchased somewhere in the adjoin- 
ing county; but still she lived in it in a manner 
as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity 
of the great house in a sort while she lived, which 
afterwards came to decay, and was nearly pulled 
down, and all its old ornaments stripped and 
carried away to the owner's other house, where they 
were set up, and looked as awkward as if some one 
were to carry away the old tombs they had seen 
lately at the Abbey, and stick them uj) in Lady 
C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, 
as much as to say " that would be foolish indeed." 
And then I told how, when she came to die, her 
funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, 
and some of the gentry too, of the neighbourhood 
for many miles round, to show their respect for her 
memory, because she had been such a good and 
religious woman ; so good indeed that she knew 



154 DREAM CHILDREN. 

all the Psaltery by heart, aye, and a great part of 
the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread 
her hands. Then I told what a tall, upright, 
graceful person their great-grandmother Field once 
was ; and how in her youth she was esteemed the 
best dancer — here Alice's little right foot played 
an involuntary movement, till, upon my looking 
grave, it desisted — the best dancer, I was saying, 
in the county, till a cruel disease, called a cancer, 
came, and bowed her down with pain ; but it could 
never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop, 
but they were still upright, because she was so 
good and religious. Then I told how she was used 
to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great 
lone house; and how she believed that an appari- 
tion of two infants was to be seen at midnight 
gliding up and down the great staircase near where 
she slept, but she said "those innocents would do 
her no harm ;" and how frightened I used to be, 
though in those days I had my maid to sleep with 
me, because I was never half so good or religious 
as she — and yet I never saw the infants. Here 
John expanded all his eye-brows, and tried to look 
courageous. Then I told how good she was to all 
her grand-children, having us to the great house 
in the holydays, where I in particular used to 
spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the 
old busts of the Twelve Caesars, that had been 



DREAM CHILDREN. 155 

Emperors of Rome, till tlie old marble lieads would 
seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble 
with tliem ; liow I never could be tired with roam- 
ing about that huge mansion, with its vast empty- 
rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering 
tapestry, and carved oaken pannels, with the gild- 
ing almost rubbed out — sometimes in the spacious 
old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to 
myself, unless when now and then a solitary gar- 
dening man would cross me — and how the necta- 
rines and peaches hung upon the walls, without 
my ever offering to pluck them, because they were 
forbidden fruit, unless now and then, — and because 
I had more pleasure in strolling about among the 
old melancholy-looking yew-trees, or the firs, and 
picking up the red berries, and the fir apples, which 
were good for nothing but to look at — or in lying 
about upon the fresh grass, with all the fine garden 
smells around me — or basking in the orangery, 
till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along 
with the oranges and the limes in that grateful 
warmth — or in watching the dace that darted to 
and fro in the fish-pond, at the bottom of the gar- 
den, with here and there a great sulky pike hang- 
ing midway down the water in silent state, as if it 
mocked at their impertinent friskings, — I had 
more pleasure in these busy-idle diversions, than in 
all the sweet flavours of peaches, nectarines, oranges, 



156 DREAM CHILDREN. 

and sucli like common baits of children. Here 
John slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch 
of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, he had 
meditated dividing with her, and both seemed will- 
ing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. 
Then in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told 
how, though their great-grandmother Field loved 
all her grand-children, yet in an especial manner 

she might be said to love their uncle, John L , 

because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, 
and a king to the rest of us ; and, instead of mop- 
ing about in solitary corners, like some of us, he 
would mount the most mettlesome horse he could 
get, when but an imp no bigger than themselves, 
and make it carry him half over the county in a 
morning, and join the hunters when there were 
any out — and yet he loved the old great house 
and gardens too, but had too much spirit to be 
always pent up within their boundaries — and how 
their uncle grew up to man's estate as brave as he 
was handsome, to the admiration of every body, 
but of their great-grandmother Field most espe- 
cially; and how he used to carry me upon his 
back when I was a lame-footed boy — for he was 
a good bit older than me — many a mile when I 
could not walk for pain ; — and how in after-life 
he became lame-footed too, and I did not always 
(I fear) make allowances enough for him when 



DREAM CHILDREN. 157 

he was impatient, and in pain, nor remember suffi- 
ciently how considerate lie had been to me when I 
was lame-footed; and how when he died, though 
he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he 
had died a great while ago, such a distance there 
is betwixt life and death; and how I bore his 
death as I thought pretty well at first, but after- 
wards it haunted and haunted me ; and though I 
did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as 
I think he would have done if I had died, yet I 
missed him all day long, and knew not till then 
how much I had loved him. I missed his kind- 
ness, and I missed his crossness, and wished him 
to be alive again, to be quarrelling with him (for 
we quarrelled sometimes), rather than not have 
him again, and was as uneasy without him, as he 
their poor uncle must have been when the doctor 
took off his limb. Here the children fell a cry- 
ing, and asked if their little mourning which 
they had on was not for Uncle John, and they 
looked up, and prayed me not to go on about their 
uncle, but to tell them some stories about their 
pretty dead mother. Then I told how for seven 
long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in des- 
pair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice 
W n; and, as much as children could under- 
stand, I explained to them what coyness, and diffi- 
culty, and denial meant in maidens — when sud- 



158 DREAM CHILDREN. 

denly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice 
looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-pre- 
sentment, that I became in doubt which of them 
stood there before me, or whose that bright hair 
was, — and while I stood gazing, both the children 
gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and 
still receding, till nothing at last but two mourn- 
ful features were seen in the uttermost distance, 
which, without speech, strangely impressed upon 
me the effects of speech; "We are not of Alice, 
nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The chil- 
dren of Alice call Bartrum father. We are noth- 
ing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only 
what might have been, and must wait upon the 
tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we 

have existence, and a name " and immediately 

awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bache- 
lor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the 
faithful Bridget unchanged by my side — but John 
L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever. 



DEE AM CHILDKEN. 159 



DEEAM CHILDKEN: A EEYEKIE. 

PAGE 

152 — Great house in Norfolk. With his usual 
love of mystification, Lamb places Blakesmoor (or 
Gilston) in Norfolk, although in other particulars 
following the description of the preceding essay. 

153 — How religious and how good. In the 
poem, "The Grandame," Lamb writes thus of his 
grandmother Eield: 

" For she had studied patience in the school 
Of Christ ; much comfort she had thence derived, 
And was 2^ follower of the Nazarene." 

153 — Not indeed the mistress. In the poem 
quoted above are also these lines : 

" For lowly born was she, and long had eat, 

Well-earn'd the bread of service 

I remember well 
Her reverend image : I remember too, 
With what a zeal she served her master's house." 



160 DREAM CHILDREN. 

155 — Unless novj and then. A graphic ac- 
count of the picking of one peach is given in his 
easay, " The Last Peach." 

156 — John L . John Lamb, who was his 

mother's, as well as his grandmother's favorite. 

156 — He became lame-footed too. About the 
time of his mother's death, John Lamb hurt his leg 
and never recovered from his lameness. 

157 — When he died. Of John Lamb's death 
and its effect on Charles and Mary, Miss Words- 
worth wrote to Henry Crabb Robinson, in 1822 : 
" The death of their brother, no doubt, has afflicted 
them m.uch more than the death of any brother, 
with whom there had, in near neighborhood, been 
so little personal or family communication, would 
afflict any other minds." 

158 — Call Bartrum father. There is very 
insufficient and inconclusive evidence that Lamb's 
Alice married one Bartrum, a London pawn-broker. 
The use of the name here seems, however, to dis- 
prove this theory. We must be content to leave 
Alice, as Lamb left her, an unsolved mystery, all 
the more fascinating for her illusiveness. 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 161 



KECOLLECTIONS OF THE SOUTH SEA 

HOUSE. 

[London Magazine, August, 1820.] 

Situated at tlie nortli-west corner of Thread- 
needle Street, opposite the church of St. Martin's 
Outwich, was a large and stately edifice, con- 
structed of brick and stone, with stone copings, 
rustic quoins, three ranges of windows, and a mag- 
nificent portal, above which rose a grand central 
window, ornamented, like the angles of the pile, 
with rustic work. The portal, provided with 
richly-carved gates, opened upon a spacious quad- 
rangular court-yard, surrounded by a handsome 
piazza, formed by columns of the Doric order. 

The entire pile, with its grand court- 
yard and appendages, occupied a vast space of 
ground, running backward as far as Old Broad 
Street, where it had another frontage opposite St. 
Peter-le-Poor 



162 THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 

The principal feature of the edifice was the great 
hall, in which the Courts of the Directors were 
held, where sales of stock took place, where sub- 
scriptions were announced, and dividends pro- 
claimed. This hall was hung round with huge 
maps of Mexico, and ornamented with portraits of 
Queen Anne, of the reigning Sovereign, George I., 
and of the governor, the sub-governor, and the 
deputy-governor of the South Sea Company. Un- 
derneath the building were immense arched vaults, 
wherein the treasures of the Company were depos- 
ited. . . . Such was the South Sea House in 
1720 — the period of its greatest splendor. It is 
now a gloomy pile, and its courts are deserted. 

— William Harrison AinswortJi. 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 163 



KECOLLECTIONS OF THE SOUTH SEA 

HOUSE. 

Reader, in thy passage from the Bank — 
where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly 
dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like 
myself) — to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for 
Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy subur- 
ban retreat northerly, — didst thou never observe 
a melancholy-looking, handsome, brick and stone 
edifice, to the left — where Threadneedle-street 
abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast 
often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping 
wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with 
cloisters, and pillars, with few or no traces of goers- 
in or comers-out — a desolation something like 
Balclutha's.* 

This was once a house of trade, — a centre of 
busy interests. The throng of merchants was here 

* I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate. 
— OSSIAN 



164 THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 

— the quick pulse of gain — and here some forms 
of business are still kept up, though the soul be 
long since lied. Here are still to be seen stately 
porticos ; imposing staircases ; offices roomy as the 
state apartments in palaces — deserted, or thinly 
peopled with a few straggling clerks ; the still 
more sacred interiors of court and committee 
rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, door- 
keepers — directors seated in form on solemn days 
(to proclaim a dead dividend), at long worm-eaten 
tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished 
gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver ink- 
stands long since dry ; — the oaken wainscot hung 
with pictures of deceased governors and sub-gov- 
ernors, of Queen Anne, and the two first monarchs 
of the Brunswick dynasty ; — huge charts, which 
subsequent discoveries have antiquated; — dusty 
maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, — and soundings 
of the Bay of Panama 1 — The long passages hung 
with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose 
substance might defy any, short of the last, confla- 
gration : — with vast ranges of cellarage under all, 
where dollars and pieces of eight once lay, an 
"unsunned heap," for Mammon to have solaced 
his solitary heart withal, — long since dissipated, 
or scattered into air at the blast of the brealdng of 

that famous Bubble. 

Such is the South Sea-house. At least, such it 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 165 

was forty years ago, when I knew it, — a magnifi- 
cent relic ! Wlaat alterations may have been made 
in it since, I have had no opportunities of verify- 
ing. Time, I take for granted, has not freshened 
it. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleep- 
ing waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates 
upon it. The moths, that were then battening 
upon its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have 
rested from their depredations, but other light 
generations have succeeded, making fine fretwork 
among their single and double entries. Layers of 
dust have accumulated (a superf oetation of dirt !) 
upon the old layers, that seldom used to be dis- 
turbed, save by some curious finger, now and then, 
that wished to explore the mode of book-keeping in 
Queen Anne's reign ; or, with less hallowed curi- 
osity, sought to unveil some of the mysteries of that 
tremendous HOAX, whose extent the petty pecula- 
tors of our day look back upon with the same 
expression of incredulous admiration, and hopeless 
ambition of rivalry, as would become the puny face 
of modern conspiracy contemplating the Titan size 
of V^aux's superhuman plot. 

Peace to the manes of the Bubble ! Silence 
and destitution are upon thy walls, proud house, 
for a memorial ! 

Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring 
and living commerce, — amid the fret and fever of 



166 THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 

speculation — with the Bank, and the 'Change, and 
the India-house about thee, in the hey-day of pres- 
ent prosperity, with their important faces, as it 
were insulting thee, their ^oor neiglibour out of 
business — to the idle, and merely contemplative, 

— to such as me, old house ! there is a charm in 
thy quiet : — a cessation — a coolness from business 

— an indolence almost cloistral — which is delight- 
ful ! With what reverence have I paced thy great 
bare rooms and courts at eventide ! They spoke of 
the past : — the shade of some dead accountant, 
with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as 
in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle 
me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great 
dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of 
the present day could lift from their enshrining 
shelves — with their old fantastic flourishes, and 
decorative rubric inter lacings — their siuns in triple 
columniations, set down with formal superfluity of 
cyphers — with pious sentences at the beginning, 
without which our religious ancestors never ven- 
tured to open a book of business, or bill of lading 

— the costly vellum covers of some of them almost 
persuading us that we are got into some better 
library, — are very agreeable and edifying specta- 
cles. I can look upon these defunct dragons with 
complacency. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled 
penknives (our ancestors had everything on a 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 167 

larger scale than we have hearts for) are as good 
as anything from Herculaneum. The pounce-boxes 
of our days have gone retrograde. 

The very clerks which I remember in the South 
Sea-house — I speak of forty years back — had an 
air very different from those in the public offices 
that I have had to do with since. They partook of 
the genius of the place ! 

There were mostly (for the establishment did 
not admit of superfluous salaries,) bachelors. Gen- 
erally (for they had not much to do) persons of a 
curious and speculative turn of mind. Old-fash- 
ioned, for a reason mentioned before. Humourists, 
for they were of all descriptions ; and, not having 
been brought together in early life (which has a 
tendency to assimilate the members of corporate 
bodies to each other), but, for the most part, placed 
in this house in ripe or middle age, they necessa- 
rily carried into it their separate habits and oddities, 
unqualified, if I may so speak, as into a common 
stock. Hence they formed a sort of Noah's ark. 
Odd fishes. A lay-monastery. Domestic retainers 
in a great house, kept more for show than use. 
Yet pleasant fellows, full of chat — and not a few 
among them had arrived at considerable proficiency 
on the German flute. 

The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cam- 
bro-Briton. He had something of the choleric com- 



168 THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 

plexion of Ms countrymen stamped on his visnomy, 
but was a worthy sensible man at bottom. He 
wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed out, 
in the fashion which I remember to have seen in 
caricatures of what were termed, in my young days, 
llaccaronies. He was the last of that race of 
beaux. Melancholy as a gib-cat over his counter 
all the forenoon, I think I see him, making up 
his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, 
as if he feared every one about him was a 
defaulter; in his hypochondry ready to imagine 
himself one ; haunted, at least, with the idea of the 
possibility of his becoming one : his tristful visage 
clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at 
Anderton's at two (where his picture still hangs, 
taken a little before his death by desire of the 
master of the coffee-house, which he had frequented 
for the last five-and-twenty years), but not attain- 
ing the meridian of its animation till evening 
brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The simul- 
taneous sound of his well-known rap at the door 
with the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a 
topic of never failing mirth in the families which 
tliis dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence. 
Then was his forte, his glorified hour ! How 
would he chirp, and expand, over a muffin I How 
would he dilate into secret history I His country- 
man, Pennant himself, in particular, could not be 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 169 

more eloquent than lie in relation to old and new 
London — the site of old theatres, churches, streets 

gone to decay — where Rosomund's j^ond stood ■ 

the Mulberry-gardens ~ and the Conduit in Cheap 

— with many a pleasant anecdote, derived from 
paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which 
Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of Nooii^ 

— the worthy decendants of those heroic confessors, 
who, flying to this country, from the wrath of 
Louis the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive 
the flame of pure religion in the sheltering obscuri- 
ties of Hog-lane, and the vicinity of the Seven 
Dials ! 

Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He 
had the air and stoop of a nobleman. You would 
have taken him for one, had you met him in one 
of the passages leading to Westminster-hall. By 
stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body 
forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to 
be the effect of an habitual condescending attention 
to the applications of their inferiors. While he 
held you in converse, you felt "strained to the 
height " in the colloquy. The conference over, you 
were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignifi- 
cance of the pretensions which had just awed you. 
His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did 
not reach^to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in 
its original state of white paper. A sucking babe 



170 THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 

miglit liave posed him. What was it then? Was 
he rich ? Alas, no ! Thomas Tame was very poor. 
Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentle-folks, 
when I fear all was not well at all times within. 
She had a neat meagre person, which it was evi- 
dent she had not sinned in over-pampering ; but in 
its veins was noble blood. She traced her descent, 
by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never 
thoroughly understood, — much less can explain 
with any heraldic certainty at this time of day, — 
to the illustrious, but unfortunate house of Der- 
wentwater. This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. 
This was the thought — the sentiment — the bright 
solitary star of your lives, — ye mild and happy 
pair, — which cheered you in the night of intellect, 
and in the obscurity of your station ! This was to 
you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of 
glittering attainments : and it was worth them all 
together. You insulted none with it; but, while 
you wore it as a j^iece of defensive armour only, no 
insult likewise could reach you through it. Decus 
et solamen. 

Of quite another stanlp was the then accountant, 
John Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, 
nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. 
He "thought an accountant the greatest character 
in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in 
it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE, 171 

fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, 
''with other notes than to the Orphean lyre." He 
did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. 
His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle- 
street, which, without anything very substantial 
appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man's 
notions of himself that lived in them, (I know not 
who is the occupier of them now*) resounded fort- 
nightly to the notes of a concert of " sweet breasts," 
as our ancestors would have called them, culled 
from club-rooms and orchestras — chorus singers — 
first and second violincellos — double basses — and 
clarionets — who ate his cold mutton, and drank 
his punch, and praised his ear. He sate like Lord 
Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp was 
quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, 
that were purely ornamental, were banished. You 
could not speak of anything romantic without 
rebuke. Politics were excluded. A newspaper 
was thought too refined and abstracted. The 
whole duty of man consisted in writing off dividend 
warrants. The striking of the annual balance in 

*I have since been informed, that the present tenant of them 
is a Mr. Lamb, a gentleman who is happy in the possession of 
some choice pictures, and among them a rare portrait of Milton, 
which I mean to do myself the pleasure of going to see, and at 
the same time to refresh my memory with the sight of old 
scenes. Mr. Lamb has the character of a right courteous and 
communicative collector. 



172 THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 

the company's books (wliicli, perhaps, differed from 
the balance of last year in the sum of 251. Is. 6cZ.) 
occupied his days and nights for a month previous. 
Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of things 
(as they call them in the city) in his beloved house, 
or did not sigh for a return of the old stirring 
days when South Sea hopes were young — (he was 
indeed equal to the weilding of any the most intri- 
cate accounts of the most flourishing company in 
these or those days) : — but to a genuine accountant 
the difference of proceeds is as nothing. The frac- 
tional farthing is as dear to his heart as the thou- 
sands which stand before it. He is the true actor, 
who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, 
must act it with like intensity. With Tipp form 
was everything. His life was formal. His actions 
seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen was not less 
erring than his heart. He made the best executor 
in the world : he was plagued with incessant execu- 
torships accordingly, which excited his spleen and 
soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would 
swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose 
rights he would guard with a tenacity like the 
grasp of the dying hand, that commended their 
interests to his protection. With all this there was 
about him a sort of timidity — (his few enemies 
used to give it a worse name) — a something which, 
in reverence to the dead, we will place, if you 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 1^3 

please, a little on this side of the heroic. Nature 
certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp 
with a sufficient measure of the principle of self- 
preservation. There is a cowardice which we do 
not despise, because it has nothing base or treach- 
erous in its elements; it betrays itself, not you: it 
is mere temperament; the absence of the romantic 
and the enterprising; it sees a lion in the way, and 
will not, with Fortinbras, "greatly find quarrel m 
a straw," when some supposed honour is at stake. 
Tipp never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his 
life; or leaned against the rails of a balcony; or 
walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked 
down a precipice; or let off a gun; or went upon 
a water-party; or would willingly let you go if he 
could have helped it: neither was it recorded of 
him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever 
forsook friend or principle. 

Whom next shall we summon from the dusty 
dead, in whom common qualities become uncom- 
mon?— Can I forget thee, Henry Man, the wit, 
the polished man of letters, the author, of the 
South Sea House? who never enteredst thy office 
in a morning, or quitted it in mid-day — (what 
didst thou in an office ?)— without some quirk 
that left a sting! Thy gibes and thy jokes are 
now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten vol- 
umes, which I had the good fortune to rescue from 



174 THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 

a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and found 
tliee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit 
is a little gone by in these fastidious days — thy 
topics are staled by the " new-born gauds " of the 
time : — but great thou used to be in Public Led- 
gers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham, and Shel- 
bourne, and E-ockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, 
and Clinton, and the war which ended in the tear- 
ing' from Great Britain her rebellious colonies, — 
and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, 
and Dunning, and Pratt, and Richmond, — and 

such small politics. 

A little less facetious, and a great deal more 
obstreperous, was fine rattling rattleheaded Plumer. 
He was descended, — not in a right line, reader, 
(for his lineal pretensions, like his personal, 
favoured a little of the sinister bend) from the 
Plumer s of Hertfordshire. So tradition ^ave him 
out; and certain family features not a little 
sanctioned the opinion. Certainly old Walter 
Plumer (his reputed author) had been a rake in his 
days, and visited much in Italy, and had seen the 
world. He was uncle, bachelor-uncle, to the fine 
old Whig still living, who has represented the 
county in so many successive parliaments, and has 
a fine old mansion near Ware. Walter flourished 
in George the Second's days, and was the same who 
was summoned before the House of Commons about 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 175 

a business of franks, with tlie old Ducliess of Marl- 
borough. You may read of it in Johnson's Life of 
Cave. Cave came off cleverly in that business. 
It is certain our Plumer did nothing to discounte- 
nance the rumour. He rather seemed pleased 
whenever it was, with all gentleness, insinuated. 
But, besides his family pretensions, Plumer was an 
engaging fellow, and sang gloriously. 

Not so sweetly sang Plumer as thou sangest, 

mild, child-like, pastoral M ; a flute's breathing 

less divinely whispering than thy Arcadian melo- 
dies, when, in tones worthy of Arden, thou didst 
chant that song sung by Amiens to the banished 
Duke, which proclaims the winter wind more 
lenient than for a man to be ungrateful. Thy sire 
was old surly M , the unapproachable church- 
warden of Bishopsgate. He knew not what he did, 
when he begat thee, like spring, gentle offspring of 
blustering winter : — only unfortunate in thy end- 
ing, which should have been mild, conciliatory, 
swan-like. 

Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes 
rise up, but they must be mine in private : — 
already I have fooled the reader to the top of his 
bent ; — else could I omit that strange creature 
WooUett, who existed in trying the question, and 
hought litigations f — and still stranger, inimitable, 
solemn Hepworth, from whose gravity Newton 



176 THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 

might liave deduced the law of gravitation. How 
profoundly would he nib a pen — with what delib- 
eration would he wet a wafer ! 

But it is time to close — night's wheels are rat- 
tling fast over me — it is proper to have done with 
this solemn mockery. 

Reader, what if 1 have been playing with thee 
all this while — peradventure the very names^ 
which I have summoned up before thee, are fan- 
tastic — insubstantial — like Henry Pimpernel, and 
old John Naps of Greece : 

Be satisfied that something answering to them 
has had a being. Their importance is from the 
past. 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. I'^T 



RECOLLECTIONS OE THE SOUTH SEA 

HOUSE. 

rCharles Lamb left Christ's Hospital Nov. 23, 1789, and 
obtained his appointment in the East India House Apr 5, 
I7Q2 During most or all of the time between these two da es, 
he was employed at the South Sea House, under his brother 
John; but of this period no account is left to us e-ep ^hat 
furnished in this essay, written thirty years after he left the 
South Sea House, and containing almost nothmg of personal 
value. This was the first publication over the name of Eha. 
E. D. H.] 

PAGE V J! xl, 

\^4,^ That famous Biibhle. The story of the 
South Sea Bubble, which, bursting in 1720, caused 
almost universal bankruptcy, is one of the strang- 
est stories of the early part of the 18th century. 
During the nine years following 1711, all England 
went mad over stock companies. The fruitful 
mother of these bogus companies was that known 
as "The Governor and Company of Merchants of 
Great Britain trayding to the South Seas." By 



178 THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 

grossest fraud, tlie stock advanced as liigli as 1000 
per cent, and princes, nobles, members of parliament 
were alike involved in its transactions. When at 
last, in accordance with the royal proclamation 
declaring the illegality of such companies, the Bub- 
ble was burst, the extent of the fraud was apparent. 
At the parliamentary investigation, opened Dec. 8, 
1720, the directors were ordered to produce ail 
their books of accounts, and the property of all the 
directors was confiscated for the relief of the 
sufferers. It was many years, however, before 
England recovered from this blow to her prosperity. 

165 — Forty years. In reality, but thirty 
years. 

166 — No skill in figuring. One of Lamb's 
fellows in the East India House has corroborated 
this statement, by the remark that Lamb was 
neither a neat nor an accurate accountant, and that 
he made frequent errors which he wiped out with 
Jils little finger. Perhaps for this reason. Lamb 
whimsically refers to himself as a remarkably neat 
accountant, in his " Character of the Late Elia." 

168 — Pennant. Thomas Pennant, a famous 
naturalist and antiquary. 

171 — A Mr. Lamh. One of Elia's innocent 
mystifications, in which he refers to his brother 
John Lamb, a retired official of the South Sea 
House. 



THE SOUTH SEA HOUSE. 179 

173 — Greatly find quarrel in a straw. Hamlet : 
Act lY, Sc. 1. 



** Rightly to be great 
Is not to stir without great argument 
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw 
When honor's at the stake." 



173 — Two forgotten volumes. "Miscellanies in 
Prose and Yerse." 2 vols. 1802. Man also wrote 
many political articles for the Morning Post. 

175 — A business of franks. "A slight mis- 
take. It was Cave the Printer that was brought 
before the House for too conscientiously exercising 
his inspection of Mr. Plumer's franks." — Percy 
Fitzgerald. 

175 — Song sung hy Amiens. As You Like 
It: Actll, Sc. 7. 

176 — Henry Pimpernel^ and old John Naps of 
Greece. Taming of the Shrew. Induction: Sc. 2. 



180 OXrORD IN THE VACATION. 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 

[London Magazine, October, 1820.] 

I was not train'd in Academic bowers, 

And to those leam'd streams I nothing owe 

Which copious from those twin fair founts do flow; 

Mine have been any thing but studious hours. 

Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers, 

Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap ; 

My blow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap, 

And I -walk gowned ; feel unusual powers. 

Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech, 

Old Ramus' ghost is busy at my brain ; 

And my scull teems with notions infinite. ■ 

Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach 

Truths, which transcend the searching Schoolmen's vein, 

And half had stagger'd that stout Stagirite. 

— Charles Lamb : Sonnet Written at Cambridge. 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 181 



OXFOED IN THE VACATION. 

Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of 
this article — as the wary connoisseur in prints, 
with cursory eye (which, while it reads, seems as 
though it read not,) never fails to consult the quis 
sculpsit in the corner, before he pronounces some 
rare piece to be a Yivares, or a Woollet — me- 
thinks I hear you exclaim. Reader, Who is Elia ? 

Because in my last I tried to divert thee with 
some half -forgotten humours of old clerks defunct, 
in an old house of business, long since gone to 
decay, doubtless you have already set me down in 
your mind as one of the self -same college — a 
votary of the desk — a notched and cropt scrivener 
— one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick 
people are said to do, through a quill. 

Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I con- 
fess that it is my humour, my fancy — in the fore- 
part of the day, when the mind of your man of 



182 OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 

letters requires some relaxation — (and none better 
than such as at first seems most abhorrent from his 
beloved studies) — to while away some good hours 
of my time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons, 
raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In 
the first place ***** and then it sends 
you home with such increased appetite to your 
books ******* not to say, that 
your outside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, 
do receive into them, most kindly and naturally, 
the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays — so 
that the very parings of a counting-house are, in 
some sort, the settings up of an author. The 
enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning 
among the cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks 
and curvets so at its ease over the flowery carpet- 
ground of a midnight dessertation. — It feels its 
promotion. * * * * go that you see, upon 
the whole, the literary dignity of ^lia is very little, 
if at all, compromised in the condescension. 

Not that, in my anxious detail of the many com- 
modities incidental to the life of a public oflice, I 
would be thought blind to certain flaws, which a 
cunning carper might be able to pick in this 
Joseph's vest. And here I must have leave, in the 
fulness of my soul, to regret the abolition, and 
doing-away-with altogether, of those consolatory 
interstices, and sprinklings of freedom, through the 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 183 

four seasons, — tlie red-letter days^ now become, to 
all intents and purposes, dead-letter days. There 
was Paul, and Stephen, and Barnabas — 

Andrew and John, men famous in old times 

— we were used to keep all their days holy, as long 
back as I was at school at Christ's. I remember 
their effigies, by the same token, in the old Basket 
Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy 

posture holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act 

of flaying, after the famous Marsyas by Spagno- 

letti. 1 honoured them all, and could almost 

have wept the defalcation of Iscariot — so much 
did we love to keep holy memories sacred : — only 
methought I a little grudged at the coalition of the 
better Jude with Simon — clubbing (as it were) 
their sanctities together, to make up one poor 
gaudy-day between them — as an economy unworthy 
of the dispensation. 

These were bright visitations in a scholar's and 
a clerk's life — "far off their coming shone." — I 
was as good as an almanac in those days. I could 
have told you such a saint's-day falls out next week, 
or the week after. Peradventure the Epiphany, by 
some periodical infelicity, would, once in six years, 
merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better than 
one of the profane. Let me nol be thouo'ht to 



184 OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 

arraign the wisdom of my civil superiors, who have 
judged the further observation ,of these holy tides 
to be papistical, superstitious. Only in a custom of 
such long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses 

the Bishops had, in decency, been first sounded 

but I am wading out of my depths. I am not the 
man to decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical 

authority 1 am plain Elia — no Selden, nor 

Archbishop Usher — though at present in the thick 
of their books, here in the heart of learning, under 
the shadow of the mighty Bodley. 

I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. 
To such a one as myself, who has been defrauded 
in his young years of the sweet food of academic 
institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a 
few idle weeks at, as one or other of the Universi- 
ties. Their vacation too, at this time of the year, 
falls in so pat with ours. Here 1 can take my 
walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree 
or standing I please. I seem admitted ad eundem. 
I fetch up past opportunities. 1 can rise at the 
chapel-bell, and dream that it rings for me. In 
moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. 
When the peacock vein rises, I strut a Grentleman 
Commoner. In graver moments I proceed Master 
of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike 
that respectable character. I have seen your dim- 
eyed vergers, and bed-makers in spectacles, drop a 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 185 

bow or curtsey, as I pass, wisely mistaking me for 
something of the sort. I go about in black, which 
favours the notion. Only in Christ Church rever- 
end quadrangle, I can be content to pass for noth- 
ing short of a Seraphic Doctor. 

The walks at these times are so much one's 
own, — the tall trees of Christ's, the groves of Mag- 
dalen ! The halls deserted, and with open doors, 
inviting one to slip in unperceived, and pay a 
devoir to some Founder, or noble or royal Bene- 
factress (that should have been ours) whose portrait 
seems to smile upon their over-looked beadsman, 
and to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a 
peep in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, 
redolent of antique hospitality: the immense caves 
of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial recesses; 
ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries 
ago; and spits which have cooked for Chaucer! 
Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is 
hallowed to me through his imagination, and the 
Cook goes forth a Manciple. 

Antiquity I thou wondrous charm, what art thou ? 
that, being nothing, art everything! When thou 
wert^ thou wert not antiquity — then thou wert 
nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity^ as thou 
called'st it, to look back to with blind veneration ; 
thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern ! 
What mystery lurks in this retroversion ? or what 



186 OXFOKD IN THE YACATIOi^. 

half Januses are we, tliat cannot look forward with 
the same idolatry with which we for ever revert I 
The mighty future is as nothing, being everything ! 
the past is everything, being nothing 1 

What were thy darh ages f Surely the sun rose 
as brightly then as now, and man got him to his 
work in the morning. Why is it that we can never 
hear mention of them without an accompanying 
feeling, as though a palpable obscure had dimmed 
the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered 
to and fro groping ! 

Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do 
most arride and solace me, are thy repositories of 
mouldering learning, thy shelves 

What a place to be in is an old library! It 
seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that 
have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, 
were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle 
state. I do not want to handle, to profane the 
lea,ves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dis- 
lodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning, walking 
amid their foliage ; and the odour of their old 
moth-scented coverings, is fragrant as the first 
bloom of those sciential apples which grew amid 
the happy orchard. 

Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder 
repose of MSS. Those varice lectiones, so tempt- 
ing to the more erudite palates, do but disturb and 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 187 

unsettle my faith.* I am no Herculanean raker. 
The credit of the three witnesses might have slept 
unimpeached for me. I leave these curiosities to 
Porson, and to G. D. — whom, by the way, I found 
busy as a moth over some rotten archive, rum- 
maged out of some seldom-explored press, in a nook 
at Oriel. With long poring, he is grown almost 
into a book. He stood as passive as one by the 
side of the old shelves. I longed to new-coat him 
in Russia, and assign him his place. He might 
ha;ve mustered for a tall Scapula. 

D. is assiduous in his visits to these seats of 
learning. No inconsiderable portion of his moder- 
ate fortune, I apprehend, is consumed in journeys 
between them and Cliff ord's-inn where, like a 

* There is something to me repugnant, at any time, in written 
hand. The text never seems determinate. Print settles it. I 
had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty — as spring- 
ing up with all its parts absolute — till, in evil hour, I was shown 
the original written copy of it, together with the other minor- 
poems of its author, in the Library of Trinity, kept like some 
treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the 
Cam, or sent them, after the latter cantos of Spenser, into the 
Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in 
their ore ! interlined, corrected ! as if their words were mortal, 
alterable, displaceable at pleasure ! as if they might have been 
otherwise, and just as good! as if inspiration were made up of 
parts, and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent ! I will never 
go into the workshop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight 
of his picture, till it is fairly off the easel; no, not if Raphael 
were to be alive again, and painting another Galatea. 



18o OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 

dove on the asp's nest, he has long taken up his 
unconscious abode, amid an incongruous assembly 
of attorneys, attorneys' clerks, apparitors, promoters, 
vermin of the law, among whom he sits, "in calm 
and sinless peace." The fangs of the law pierce 
him not — the winds of litigation blow over his 
humble chambers — the hard sheriff's officer moves 
his hat as he passes — legal nor illegal discourtesy 
touches him — none thinks of offering violence or 
injustice to him* — you would as soon "strike an 
abstract idea." 

D. has been engaged, he tells me, through a 
course of laborious years, in an investigation into 
all curious matter connected with the two Uni- 
versities ; and has lately lit upon a MS. collection 

of charters, relative to C , by which he hopes to 

settle some disputed points — particularly that long 
controversy between them as to priority of foun- 
dation. The ardour with which he engages in 
these liberal pursuits, I am afraid, has not met with 

* Violence or injustice certainly none, Mr. Elia. But you will 
acknowledge, that the charming unsuspectingness of our friend 
has sometimes laid him open to attacks, which, though savouring 
(we hope) more of waggery than malice — such is our unfeigned 
respect for G. D. — might, we think, much better have been 

omitted. Such was that silly joke of L , who, at the time 

the question of the Scotch Novels was first agitated, gravely 
assured our friend — who as gravely went about repeating it in 
all companies — that Lord Castlereagh had acknowledged him- 
self to be the author of Waverley ! — A^ote — not by Elia, 



OXrOKD IN THE VACATION. 189 

all the encouragement it deserved, either here, or 

at C . Your caputs and heads of colleges, care 

less than anybody else about these questions. — 
Contented to suck the milky fountains of their 
Ahna Maters, without inquiring into the venerable 
gentlewomen's years, they rather hold such curiosi- 
ties to be impertinent — unreverend. They have 
their good glebe lands i7i manu, and care not much 
to rake into the title-deeds. I gather at least so 
much from other sources, for D. is not a man to 
complain. 

D. started like an unbroken heifer, when I inter- 
rupted him. A priori it was not very probable 
that we should have met in Oriel. But D. would 
have done the same, had I accosted him on the sud- 
den in his own walks in Clifford's Inn, or in the 
Temple. In addition to a provoking shortsighted- 
ness (the effect of late studies and watchings at the 
midnight oil) D. is the most absent of men. He 
made a call the other morning at our friend MJ's in 
Bedford-square; and, finding nobody at home, was 
ushered into the hall, where, asking for pen and 
ink, with great exactitude of purpose he enters me 
his name in the book — which ordinarily lies about 
in such places, to record the failures of the untimely 
or unfortunate visitor — and takes his leave with 
many ceremonies, and professions of regret. Some 
two or three hours after, his walking destinies 



190 OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 

returned Mm into tlie same neiglibourhood again, 
and again the quiet image of the fire-side circle at 

MJ's Mrs. M. presiding at it like a Queen 

Lar, with pretty A. S. at her side striking 

irresistibly on his fancy, he makes another call 
(forgetting that they were " certainly not to return 
from the country before that day week ") and dis- 
aj)pointed a second time, inquires for pen and 
paper as before : again the book is brought, and in 
the line just above that in which he is about to 
print his second name, (his re-script) — his first 
name (scarce dry) looks out upon him like another 
Sosia, or as if a man should suddenly encounter his 

own duplicate ! The effect may be conceived. 

D. made many a good resolution against any such 
lapses in future. I hope he will not keep them 
too rigorously. 

For with G. D. — to be absent from i;he body, is 
sometimes (not to speak it profanely) to be pres- 
ent with the Lord. At the very time when, per- 
sonally encountering thee, he passes on with no 

recognition or, being stopped, starts like a 

thing surprized — at that moment, reader, he is on 
Mount Tabor — or Parnassus — or co-sphered with 
Plato — or, with Harrington, framing "immortal 
commonwealths" — devising some plan of amelior- 
ation to thy country, or thy species perad- 

venture meditating some individual kindness or 



OXFORD m THE VACATION. 191 

courtesy, to be done to thee thyself^ the returning 
consciousness of which made him to start so guiltily 
at thy obtruded personal presence. 

D. commenced life, after a course of hard study 
in the "House of pure Emanuel," as usher to a 
knaidsh fanatic schoolmaster at * * *, at a sal- 
ary of eight pounds per annum, with board and 
lodging. Of this poor stipend, he never received 
above half in all the laborious years he served this 
man. He tells a pleasant anecdote, that when pov- 
erty, staring out at his ragged knees, has sometimes 
compelled him, against the modesty of his nature, 
to hint at arrears, Dr. * * * would take no 
immediate notice, but, after supper, when the 
school was called together to even-song, he would 
never fail to introduce some instructive homily 
against riches, and the corruption of the heart 
occasioned through the desire of them — ending 
with "Lord, keep thy servants, above all things, 
from the heinous sin of avarice. Having food and 
raiment, let us therewith be content. Give me 

Agar's wish," and the like ; which, to the 

little auditory, sounded like a doctrine full of 
Christian prudence and simplicity, — but to j)oor 
D. was a receipt in full for that quarter's demands 
at least. 

And D. has been under-working for himself ever 
since; — drudging at low rates for unappreciating 



192 OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 

booksellers, — wasting Ms fine erudition in silent 
corrections of the classics, and in those unostenta- 
tious but solid services to learning, v/hich com- 
monly fall to the lot of laborious scholars, who have 
not the art to sell themselves to the best advantage. 
He has published poems, which do not sell, because 
their character is inobstrusive like his own, — and 
because he has been too much absorbed in ancient 
literature, to know what the popular mark in poe- 
try is, even if he could have hit it. And, there- 
fore, his verses are properly, what he terms 
them, crotchets ; voluntaries ; odes to Liberty, and 
Spring ; effusions ; little tributes, and offerings, 
left behind him, upon tables and window-seats, at 
parting from friends' houses ; and from all the inns 
of hospitality, where he has been courteously (or 
but tolerably) received in his pilgrimage. If his 
muse of kindness halt a little behind the strong 
lines, in fashion in this excitement-craving age, his 
prose is the best of the sort in the world, and 
exhibits a faithful transcript of his own healthy 
natural mind, and cheerful, innocent tone of 
conversation. 

D. is delightful any where, but he is at the best 
in such places as these. He cares not much for 
Bath. He is out of his element at Buxton, at 
Scarborow, or Harrowgate. The Cam, and the 
Isis, are to him "better than all the waters of Da- 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 



193 



mascus." On the Muses' hill he is happy, and 
good, as one of the Shepherds on the Delectable 
Mountains; and when he goes about with you to 
show you the haUs and colleges, you think you have 
with you the Interpreter at the House Beautiful. 

Aug. bth, 1820. From my rooms facing the 
Bodleian. 



194 OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 



OXFOED IN THE VACATION. 

PAGE 

181 — My last. The essay on the South Sea 
House, which this followed as second in the Elian 
series. 

181 — Agnize. Procter notices this as one of 
the obsolete words which Lamb chose to rescue 
from oblivion. 

182 — ******* The meaning of 
these asterisks is not apparent. 

182 — Waste lurappers. Lamb, in reality, was 
in the habit of writing his letters, poems, and essays 
on all sorts of waste paper. 

183 — Red-letter days. Saints' days, King's 
birthday, 5th of November, etc., etc., formerly kept 
as holidays, and printed in the almanacs with red 
ink. 

183 — Bashet Prayer Boole. The Prayer Book 
taking its name from the publisher, John Basket, 
who issued several editions. 



OXFOKD IN THE VACATION. 195 

184 — Such a one as myself. Owing- to the 
impediment in his speech, Lamb was nnfitted for 
the church, and accordingly was prevented from 
becoming a Grecian at Christ's Hospital and enjoy- 
ing the opportunity of getting an exhibition. This 
deprivation of academic instruction was one which 
he never ceased to mourn. 

185 — J^ go about in hlach. "Lamb had laid 
aside his snuff-colored suit long before I knew him, 
and was never seen in any thing but a suit of 
black, with knee breeches and gaiters, and black 

worsted or silk stockings Though his 

dress was, by courtesy, ' black ', he always contrived 
that it should exist in a condition of rusty brown." 

— P. G. Patmore, 

186 — Half Januses. "Januses of one face." 

— Sir Thomas Browne. 

186 — Arride. Another of the obsolete words 
affected by Lamb. 

187 — G. D. The gentle and eccentric scholar, 
George Dyer, whom Lamb had known since his 
school-days. Lamb loved and honored him so 
much that he felt free to make sport of his pecul- 
iarities, and occasionally, though rarely, Dyer per- 
ceived the fact. Leigh Hunt wrote of him that his 
"life was one unbroken dream of learning and 
goodness;" Talfourd says: "On he went, however, 
placid if not rejoicing, through the difficulties of 



196 OXFOED IN THE VACATION. 

a life illustrated only by scholarship ; encounter- 
ing tremendous labors ; unresting yet serene ; until 
at eighty-five he breathed out the most blameless 
of lives, which began in a struggle to end in a 
learned dream ! " 

188 — L . Lamb, himself. 

188 — Lord Castlereagh. Kobert Stewart, Lord 
Viscount, Marquis of Londonderry, secretary of 
state for foreign affairs, and leader of the Tory 
party. At the time of Lamb's famous joke, he was 
just returned from the Congress of Sovereigns at 
Vienna. 

188 — Investigation into all curious matter. 
Dyer was the author of the "History of the Uni- 
versity of Cambridge," also of the "Charters of 
Cambridge," here alluded to. 

188 — C . Cambridge. 

189 — Our friend M. Basil Montagu, an emi- 
nent lawyer, whose house was the rendezvous of 
many literary people. 

190 — A. S. Anne Skipper, who afterward mar- 
ried Bryan Waller Procter ("Barry Cornwall."} 

191 — Under-worhing for himself ever since. 
Henry Crabb Robinson says of Dyer, "He was a 
scholar, but to the end of his days (and he lived to 
be eighty-five) was a bookseller's drudge." 

[Even George Dyer's kindly spirit remonstrated against this 
detailed account of his peculiarities, which was quite recogniz- 



OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 197 

able, without the initials. In the correspondence of the Lotidon 
Magazine for December, 1820, is this note in which Lamb 
attempts the amende honorable : 

" Elia requests the Editor to inform W. K. that in his article 
on Oxford, under the initials G. D. it was his ambition to make 
more familiar to the public, a character, which, for »integrity and 
single-heartedness, he has long been accustomed to rank among 
the best patterns of his species. That, if he has failed in the end 
which he proposed, it was an error of judgment merely. That, 
if in pursuance of his purpose, he has drawn forth some personal 
peculiarities of his friend into notice, it was only from conviction 
that the public, in living subjects especially, do not endure pure 
panegyric. That the anecdotes, which he produced, were no 
more than he conceived necessary to awaken attention to charac- 
ter, and were meant solely to illustrate it. That it is an entire 
mistake to suppose, that he undertook the character to set off his 
own wit or ingenuity. That, he conceives, a candid interpreter 
might find something intended, beyond a heartless jest. That 
G. D., however, having thought it necessary to disclaim the anec- 
dote respecting Dr. , it becomes him, who never for a 

moment can doubt the veracity of his friend, to account for it 
from an imperfect remembrance of some story he heard long ago, 
and which, happening to tally with his argument, he set down 
too hastily to the account of G. D. That, from G. D.'s strong 
affirmations and proofs to the contrary, he is bound to believe it 
belongs to no part of G. D.'s biography. That the transaction, 
supposing it true, must have taken place more than forty years 
ago. That, in consequence, it is not likely to 'meet the eye of 
many, who might be justly offended.' 

" Finally, that what he has said of the Booksellers, referred to 
a period of many years, in which he had the happiness of G. D.'s 
acquaintance; and can have nothing to do with any present or 
prospective engagements of G. D. with those gentlemen, to the 
nature of which he professes himself an entire stranger." 

Probably as a balm to Dyer's wounded feelings, the para- 
graphs beginning "D. commenced life" and "And D. has been 



198 OXFORD IN THE VACATION. 

* under-working," as well as the foot notes, were omitted from the 
first edition of the essays, publislied in 1823. But Lamb seems 
not to have profited by this unfortunate experience, and in De- 
cember, 1823, publislied " Amicus Redivivus," a still more fantas- 
tical and exaggerated account of poor Dyer's peculiarities. 
Again, in 1831, he seems to be in the same kind of trouble, for 
we find him writing a most humble letter to Dyer, explaining the 
motif of some new joke he had been making at his friend's 
expense. Nevertheless, good friends they remained from their 
boyish days at Christ's till Lamb's death, in spite of these little 
ripples caused by the keen humor of the one and the gentle 
unworldliness of the other. E. D. H.] 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 199 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

[London Magazine, May, 1825.] 

I CAME home FOR EVER on Tuesday in last week. 
The incomprehensibleness of my condition over- 
whehned me. It was like passing from life into 
eternity. Every year to be as long as three, i. e. to 
have three times as much real time (time that is 
my own) in it ! I wandered about thinking I was 
happy, but feeling I was not. But that tumultu- 
ousness is passing off, and I begin to understand 
the nature of the gift. Holydays, even the annual 
month, were always uneasy joys ; their conscious 
fugitiveness ; the craving after making the most of 
them. Now, when all is holyday, there are no holy- 
days. I can sit at home, in rain or shine, without 
a restless impulse for walkings. I am daily steady- 
ing, and shall soon find it as natural to me to be 
my own master, as it has been irksome to have had 
a master. Mary wakes every morning with an 



200 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

obscure feeling that some good has happened to 
us. 

— Charles Lamb : Letter to Wordsworth. (^April 
6, 1825.) 

You will ask how I bear my freedom? Faith, 
for some days I was staggered ; could not compre- 
hend the magnitude of my deliverance ; was con- 
fused, giddy ; knew not whether I was on my head 
or my heel, as they say. But those giddy feelings 
have gone away, and my weather-glass stands at a 
degree or two above 

Content. 

— Charles Lamh : Letter to Miss Hutchinson. 
(April 18, 1825.) 



THE SUPERANKUATED MAN. 201 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 



Sera tamen respexit 

Libertas. 



If peradventure, Reader, it lias been thy lot to 
waste the golden years of thy life — thy shining 
youth — in the irksome confinement of an office; to 
have thy prison days prolonged through middle age 
down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope 
of release or respite; to have lived to forget that 
there are such things as holidays, or to remember 
them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, 
and then only, will you be able to appreciate my 
deliverance. 

It is now six and thirty years since I took my 
seat at the desk in Mincing-lane. Melancholy was 
the transition at fourteen from the abundant play- 
time, and the frequently-intervening vacations of 
school days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten 
hours' a-day attendance at a counting-house. But 



202 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

time partially reconciles us to any thing. I gradu- 
ally became content — doggedly contented, as wild 
animals in cages. 

It is true I liad my Sundays to myself ; but Sun- 
days, admirable as tlie institution of tliem is for 
purposes of worship, are for that very reason the 
very worst adapted for days of unbending and rec- 
reation.* In particular, there is a gloom for me 
attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. 
I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and 
the ballad singers — the buzz and stirring murmur 
of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. 
The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures, all 
the glittering and endless succession of knacks and 
gew-gaws, and ostentatiously displayed wares of 
tradesmen, which make a week-day saunter through 
the less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful — 
are shut out. No book-stalls deliciously to idle 
over — No busy faces to recreate the idle man who 
contemplates them ever passing by — the very face 

*Our ancestors, the noble old Puritans of Cromwell's day, 
could distinguish between a day of religious rest and a day of 
recreation ; and while they exacted a rigorous abstinence from 
all amusements (even to the walking out of nursery maids with 
their little charges in the fields) upon the Sabbath ; in the lieu of 
the superstitious observance of the Saints days, which they abro- 
gated, they humanely gave to the apprentices, and poorer sort of 
people, every alternate Thursday for a day of entire sport and 
recreation. A strain of piety and policy to be commended above 
the profane mockery of the Stuarts and their Book of Sports. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 203 

of business a charm by contrast to liis temporary 
relaxation from it. Nothing to be seen but un- 
happy countenances — or half-hai3py at best — of 
emancipated prentices and Kttle tradesfolks, with 
here and there a servant maid that has got leave to 
go out, who, slaving all the week, with the habit 
has lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free 
hour; and livelily expressing the hoUowness of a 
day's pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields 
on that day look anything but comfortable. 

But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and 
a day at Christmas, with a full week in the sum- 
mer to go and air myseK in my native fields of 
Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; 
and the prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone 
kept me up through the year, and made my durance 
tolerable. But when the week came round, did the 
glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with 
me? or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy 
days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a 
wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the 
most of them? Where was the quiet, where the 
promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was 
vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon 
the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene 
before such another snatch would come. Still the 
prospect of its coming threw something of an illu- 
mination upon the darker side of my captivity. 



204 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

Without it, as I liave said, I could scarcely have 
sustained my thraldom. 

Independently of the rigours of attendance, I 
have ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a 
mere caprice) of incapacity for business. This, 
during my latter years, had increased to such a 
degree, that it was visible in all the lines of my 
countenance. My health and my good spirits 
flagged. I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, 
to which I should be found unequal. Besides my 
day-light servitude, I served over again all night in 
my sleep, and would awake with terrors of imagin- 
ary false entries, errors in my accounts, and the 
like. I was fifty years of age, and no prospect of 
emancipation presented itself. I had grown to my 
desk, as it were ; and the wood had entered into my 
soul. 

My fellows in the office would sometimes rally 
me upon the trouble legible in my countenance; 
but I did not know that it had raised the suspicions 
of any of my employers, when, on the 5th of last 

month, a day ever to be remembered by me, L , 

the junior partner in the firm, calling me on one side, 
directly taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly 
inquired the cause of them. So taxed, I honestly 
made confession of my infirmity, and added that I 
was afraid I should eventually be obliged to resign 
his service. He spoke some words of course to 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 205 

hearten me, and there the matter rested. A whole 
week I remained labouring under the impression 
that I had acted imprudently in my disclosure; 
that I had foolishly given a handle against myself, 
and had been anticipating my own dismissal. A 
week passed in this manner, the most anxious one, 
I verily believe, in my whole life, when on the even- 
ing of the 12th of April, just as I was about quit- 
ting my desk to go home (it might be about eight 
o'clock) I received an awful summons to attend the 
presence of the whole assembled firm in the for- 
midable back parlour. I thought, now my time is 
surely come, I have done for myself, I am going to 
be told that they have no longer occasion for me. 

L , I could see, smiled at the terror I was in, 

which was a little relief to me, — when to my utter 

astonishment B , the eldest partner, began a 

formal harangue to me on the length of my services, 
my very meritorious conduct during the whole of 
the time (the deuce, thought I, how did he find 
out that? I protest I never had the confidence to 
think as much). He went on to descant on the 
expediency of retiring at a certain time of life (how 
my heart panted!) and asking me a few questions 
as to the amount of my own property, of which I 
have a little, ended with a proposal, to which his 
tln-ee partnerg nodded a grave assent, that I should 
accept from the house, which I had served so well, 



206 THE SUPEKANNUATED MAN. 

a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my 
accustomed salary — a magnificent offer ! I do not 
know what I answered between surprise and grati- 
tude, but it was understood that I accepted their 
proposal, and I was told that I was free from that 
hour to leave their service. I stammered out a 
bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I v/ent 
home — for ever. This noble benefit — gratitude 
forbids me to conceal their names — I owe to the 
kindness of the most munificent firm in the world 
— the house of Boldero, Merry weather, Bosanquet, 
and Lacy. 

Esto perpetua ! 

For the first day or two I felt stunned, over- 
whelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; I 
was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered 
about, thinking I was happy, and knowing that I 
was not. I was in the condition of a prisoner in 
the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty 
years' confinement. I could scarce trust myself 
with myself. It was like passing out of Time into 
Eternity — for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to 
have his Time all to himself. It seemed to me that 
I had more Time on my hands than I could ever 
manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was 
suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue ; I could see 
no end of my possessions ; I wanted some steward, 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 207 

or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time 
for me. And here let me caution persons grown 
old in active business, not lightly, nor without 
weighing their own resources, to forego their cus- 
tomary employment all at once, for there may be 
danger in it. I feel it by myseK, but I know that 
my resources are sufficient; and now that those 
first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a quiet 
home-feeling of the blessedness of my condition. 
I am in no hurry. Having all holidays, I am as 
though I had none. If Time hung heavy upon me, 
I could walk it away ; but I do not walk all day 
long, as I used to do in those old transient holidays, 
thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. If 
Time were troublesome, I could read it away, but I 
do not read in that violent measure, with which, 
having no Time my own but candle-light Time, I 
used to weary out my head and eye-sight in by-gone 
winters. I walk, read or scribble (as now) just 
when the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after 
pleasure ; I let it come to me. I am like the man 

That's born, and has his years come to him, 



In some green desart. 

"Years," you will say! "what is this superannu- 
ated simpleton calculating upon ? He has already 
told us, he is past fifty." 

I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but 



208 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to 
other people, and not to myself, and you will find 
me still a young fellow. For that is the only true 
Time, which a man can properly call his own, that 
which he has all to himself; the rest, though in 
some sense he may be said to live it, in other peo- 
ple's time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, 
long or short, is at least multiplied for me three- 
fold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will 
be as long as any preceding thirty. 'Tis a fair rule- 
of-three sum. 

Among the strange fantasies which beset me at 
the commencement of my freedom, and of which all 
traces are not yet gone, one was, that a vast tract 
of time had intervened since I quitted the Counting 
House. I could not conceive of it as an affair 
of yesterday. The partners, and the clerks, with 
whom I had so many years and for so many hours 
in each day of the year been closely associated — 
being suddenly removed from them — they seemed 
as dead to me. There is a fine passage, which may 
serve to illustrate this fancy, in a Tragedy by Sir 
Robert Howard, speaking of a friend's death: 

'Twas but just now he went away; 

I have not since had time to shed a tear ; 
And yet the distance does tlie same appear 
As if he had been a thousand years from me. 
Time takes no measure in Eternity. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 209 

To dissipate this awkward feeling, I have been 
fain to go among them once or twice since ; to visit 
my old desk-fellows — my co-brethren of the quill — 
that I had left below in the state militant. Not all 
the kindness with which they received me could 
quite restore to me that pleasant familiarity, which 
I had heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked 
some of our old jokes, but methought they went off 
but faintly. My old desk, the peg where I hung 
my hat, were appropriated to another. I knew it 

must be, but I could not take it kindly. D 1 

take me, if I did not feel some remorse — beast, if 
I had not, — at quitting my old compeers, the faith- 
ful partners of my toils for six and thirty years, 
that smoothed for me with their jokes and conun- 
drmiis the ruggedness of my professional road. 
Had it been so rugged then after all? or was I a 
coward simply ? Well, it is too late to repent ; and 
I also know, that these suggestions are a common 
fallacy of the mind on such occasions. But my 
heart smote me. I had violently broken the bands 
betwixt us. It was at least not courteous. I shall 
be some time before I get quite reconciled to the 
separation. Farewell, old cronies, yet not 'for long, 
for again and again I will come among ye, if I shall 

have your leave. Farewell Ch , dry, sarcastic, 

and friendly! Do , mild, slow to move, and 

gentlemanly! PI , officious to do, and to vol- 



210 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

unteer, good services ! — and thou, thou dreary pile, 
fit mansion for a Gresham or a Wittington of old, 
stately House of Merchants ; with thy labyrinthine 
passages, and light-excluding, pent-up offices, where 
candles for one half the year supplied the place of 
the sun's light ; unhealthy contributor to my weal, 
stern fosterer of my living, farewell ! In thee 
remain, and not in the obscure collection of some 
wandering bookseller, my "works!" There let 
them rest, as I do from my labours, piled on thy 
massy shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever Aqui- 
nas left, and full as useful I My mantle I bequeath 
among ye. 



THE SUPEEANNUATED MAN. 211 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN.— No. II. 

A Clerk I was in London gay. — O'Keefe. 

A Fortnight has passed since the date of my 
first communication. At that period I was approach- 
ing to tranquillity, but had not reached it. I boasted 
of a calm indeed, but it was comparative only. Some- 
thing of the first flutter was left ; an unsettling 
sense of novelty ; the dazzle to weak eyes of unac- 
customed light. I missed my old chains, forsooth, 
as if they had been some necessary part of my 
apparel. I was a poor Carthusian, from strict 
cellular discipline suddenly by some revolution 
returned upon the world. I am now as if I had 
never been other than my own master. It is natu- 
ral to me to go where I please, to do what I please. 
I find myself at eleven o'clock in the day in Bond- 
street, and it seems to me that I have been saunter- 
ing there at that very time for years past. I 
digress into Soho, to explore a book-stall. Me- 



212 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

thinks I have been thirty years a collector. There 
is nothing strange nor new in it. I find myself 
before a fine picture in a morning. Was it ever 
otherwise? What is become of Fish-street Hill? 
Where is Fenchurch-street ? Stones of old Minc- 
ing-lane which I have worn with my daily pilgrim- 
age for six and thirty years, to the footsteps of 
what toil-worn clerk are your everlasting flints now 
vocal? I indent the gayer flags of Pall Mall. It 
is Change time, and I am strangely among the 
Elgin marbles. It was no hyperbole when I ven- 
tured to compare the change in my condition to a 
passing into another world. Time stands still in a 
manner to me. I have lost all distinction of sea- 
son. I do not know the day of the week, or of the 
month. Each day used to be individually felt by 
me in its reference to the foreign post days ; in its 
distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. 
I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights' 
sensations. The genius of each day was upon me 
distinctly during the whole of it, affecting my appe- 
tite, spirits, &c. The phantom of the next day, 
with the dreary five to follow, sate as a load upon 
my poor Sabbath recreations. What charm has 
washed that Ethiop white? What is gone of 
Black Monday? All days are the same. Sunday 
itself — that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it 
too often proved, what with my sense of its fugi- 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 213 

tiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity 
of pleasure out of it — is melted down into a week 
day. I can spare to go to cliurch now, without 
grudging the huge cantle, which it used to seem to 
cut out of the holyday. I have Time for every- 
thing. I can visit a ,sick friend. I can interrupt 
the man of much occupation when he is busiest. I 
can insult over him with an invitation to take a 
day's pleasure with me to Windsor this fine May- 
morning. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the 
poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the 
world, carking and caring; like horses in a mill, 
drudging on in the same eternal round — and what 
is it all for? I recite those verses of Cowley, 
which so mightily agree with my constitution. 

Business ! the frivolous pretence 

Of human lusts to shake off innocence 

Business ! the grave impertinence : 

Business ! the thing which I of all things hate : 

Business ! the contradiction of my fate. 

Or I repeat my own lines, written in my Clerk state : 

Who first invented work — and bound the free 

And holyday-rejoicing spirit down 

To the ever-haunting importunity 

Of business, in the green fields, and the town — 

To plough, loom, anvil, spade — and oh ! most sad, 

To this dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood? 

Who but the Being unblest, alien from good, 



214 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

9 

Sabbathless Satan ! he who his unglad 

Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings, 

That round and round incalculably reel — 

For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel — 

In that red realm from whence are no returnings; 

Where toiling, and turmoiling, ever and aye 

He, and his thoughts, keep pensive worky-day! 

this divine Leisure ! — Reader, if thou art 
furnished with the Old Series of the London, turn 
incontinently to the third volume (page 367), and 
you will see my present condition there touched in 
a "Wish" by a daintier pen than I can pretend to. 
I subscribe to that Sonnet toto corde. A man can 
never have too much Time to himself, nor too little 
to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him 
NoTHiNG-TO-DO ; he should do nothing. Man, I 
verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is 
operative. I am altogether for the life contempla- 
tive. Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow 
up those accursed cotton mills? Take me that 
lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down 

As low as to the fiends. 

1 am no longer J s D n. Clerk to the 

Firm of, &c. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be 
met with in trim gardens. I am already come to 
be known byimy vacant and careless gesture, per- 
ambulating at no fixed pace, nor with any settled 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN, 215 

purpose. I walk about; not to and from. They 
tell me, a certain cum dignitate air, that has been 
buried so long with my other good parts, has begun 
to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility 
perceptibly. When I take up a newspaper, it is to 
read the state of the opera. Opus operatum est. 
I have done all that I came into this world to do. 
I have worked task-work, and have the rest of the 
day to myself. 

Beaufort-terrace^ Regent-street ; Late of Iron- 
monger s-court^ Fenchurch-street. 



216 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

PAGE 

201 — Six and thirty years. More exactly three 
and thirty, as he entered the East India House in 
1792, but probably he counted here the three years 
spent at the South Sea House. In the March of 
1822, Lamb wrote to Wordsworth, "My theory is 
to enjoy life, but my practice is against it. I grow 
ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty 
years have I served the Philistines, and my neck 
is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how 
wearisome it is to breath the air of four pent walls 
without relief, day after day, all the golden hours 
of the day between ten and four, without ease or 
interposition . . . Oh for a few years between 
the grave and the desk ! " 

202 — Our ancestors. This note was suppressed 
in the 1823 edition. 

204 — The wood had entered into my soul. In 
the letter to Wordsworth quoted above is this sen- 



THE SUPEEANNUATED MAN. 217 

tence, "I sit like Philomel all day (but not sing- 
ing), with my breast against this thorn of a desk." 

204— X- . Laey. 

205 — The most anxious one^ . . in my 
whole life. In a letter to Bernard Barton, March 
23rd, 1825, Lamb wrote: "I have offered my res- 
ignation, and it is neither accepted nor rejected. 
Eight weeks am I kept in this fearful suspense. 
Guess what an absorbing stake I feel it." 

205 — B . Boldero. 

206 — A inagnijicent offer. The amount of the 
pension was =£450, of which <£9 was deducted as an 
annuity for Mary. 

206 — Most munificent firm in the world. " With 
the one exception that he transforms the Directors 
of the India House into a private firm of merchants, 
and with one or two other slight changes of detail, 
the account seems to be a faitliful description of 
what actually happened." — Alfred Ainger. 

207 — Walk it away. One of his dreams of a 
"green old age" had been, "to have retired to Bon- 
der's End .... there to have made u}^ my 
accounts with Heaven and the company, toddling 
about between it and Cheshunt; anon stretching, 
on some fine Izaak Walton morning, to Hoddesdon 
or Am well, careless as a begger; but walking, 
walking ever till I fairly walked myself off my 
legs, dying walking ! " 



218 THE SUPEKANNUATED MAN. 

209 — Pleasant familiarity. One of his desk- 
fellows has said: "In spite of his pleasantries of 
all sorts, his popidarity with his fellow-clerks was 
unbounded. He allowed the same familiarity that 
he practised, and they all called him 'Charley'." 

210 — Dreary pile. The old building was taken 
down in 1862. 

210 — " Works. ^^ A favorite reference to the 
account books. 

214 — Divine Leisure. Lamb wrote a sonnet 
on " Leisure," companion to the one already quoted 
on '^Work." 

214 — A " TFisA." The sonnet referred to is 
this: 

" Wou'd heaven but grant my desire 
A small request I wou'd require, 
A decent house, and a good fire : 
A pot of beer to give a friend. 
And wealth enough but to extend 
My charity to th' abject poor, 
And drive penury from my door. 
But, join to this, a loving wife, 
A stranger to conjugal strife. 
My happiness wou'd be compleat, 
I'd envy not the rich and great. 
But spend my days exempt from care, 
Or anxious thoughts of 'proaching war ; 
And quiet sleep under my roof. 
And ask no more : think that's enough." 

214 — Nothing -to-do. In 1827, Lamb wrote to 



THE SUPEKANNUATED MAN. 219 

Bernard Barton, "Positively, the best thing a man 
can have to do is nothing, and next to that per- 
haps — good works." 

214 — J 8 D n. When this essay was 

published in the second Elian series, asterisks were 
substituted for these letters, and the signature "J. 
D." was omitted. 



220 OLD CHINA. 



OLD CHINA. 

[London Magazine, March, 1823.] 

Of the incidents in the happier days of his life, 
when Mary was in good health, and the daily sharer 
in all interests and pleasures, he has written with a 
special charm. There is a passage in the essay 
called Old China without which any picture of 
their united life would be incomplete. 

— Alfred Ainger. 

These realities of poverty, very imperfectly cov- 
ered over by words of fiction, are very touching. 
It is deeply interesting, that Essay, where the rare 
enjoyments of a poor scholar are brought into con- 
trast and relief with the indifference that grows 
upon him when his increased income enables him 
to acquire any objects he pleases. 

— Bryan Waller Procter. 



OLD CHINA, 221 



OLD CHINA. 

I HAVE an almost feminine partiality for old 
china. When I go to see any great house, I enquire 
for the china closet, and next for the picture gal- 
lery. I cannot defend the order of preference, but 
by saying, that we have all some taste or other, of 
too ancient a date to admit of our remembering dis- 
tinctly that it was an acquired one. I can call to 
mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I 
was taken to; but I am not conscious of a time 
when china jars and saucers were introduced into 
my imagination. 

I had no repugnance then — why should I now 
have? — to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured gro- 
tesques, that under the notion of -men and women, 
float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that 
world before perspective — a china tea-cup. 

I like to see my old friends — whom distance 
cannot diminish — figuring up in the air (so they 
appear to our optics), yet on terra firma still — for 



222 OLD CHINA. 

SO we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper 
blue, which the decorous artist, to prevent absurd- 
ity, has made to spring up beneath their sandals. 

I love the men with women's faces, and the 
•women, if possible, with still more womanish 
expressions. 

Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing 
tea to a lady from a salver — two miles off. See 
how distance seems to set off respect ! And here 
the same lady, or another — for likeness is identity 
on tea-cups — is stepping into a little fairy boat, 
moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, 
with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle 
of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infal- 
libly land her in the midst of a flowery mead — a 
furlong off on the other side of the same strange 
stream ! 

Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of 
their world — see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing 
the hays. 

Here — a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-exten- 
sive — so objects show, seen through the lucid 
atmosphere of fine Cathay. 

I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, 
over our Plyson, (which we are old fashioned 
enough to drink unmixed still of an afternoon) 
some of these speciosa miracula upon a set of 
extraordinary old blue china (a recent purchase) 



OLD CHINA. 223 

which we were now for the first time using; and 
could not help remarking, how favourable circum- 
stances had been to us of late years, that we could 
afford to please the eye sometimes with trifles of 
this sort — when a passing sentiment seemed to 
over-shade the brows of my companion. I am 
quick at detecting these summer clouds in Bridget. 

"I wish the good old times would come again," 
she said, "when we were not quite so rich. I do 
not mean, that I want to be poor ; but there was a 
middle state;" — so she was pleased to ramble on, 
— "in which I am sure we were a great deal hap- 
pier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you 
have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used 
to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury 
(and, O I how much ado I had to get you to con- 
sent in those times !) we were used to have a debate 
two or three days before, and to weigh the for and 
against^ and think what we might spare it out of, 
and what saving we could hit upon, that should be 
an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, 
when we felt the money that we paid for it. 

"Do you remember the brown suit, which you 
made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried 
shame upon you, it grew so thread-bare — and all 
because of that folio Beaumount and Fletcher, 
which you dragged home late at night, from Bar- 
ker's in Co vent-garden ? Do you remember how we 



224 OLD CHINA. 

eyed it for weeks before we could make up our 
minds to the purchase, and had not come to a deter- 
mination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday 
night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you 
should be too late — and when the old bookseller 
with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the 
twinkling taper (for he was setting bedv/ards) 
lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures — and 
when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as 
cumbersome — and when you presented it to me — 
and when we were exploring the perfectness of it 
(collating you called it) — and while I was repair- 
ing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your 
impatience would not suffer to be left till day-break 

— was there no pleasure in being "a poor man ? or 
can those neat black clothes which you wear now, 
and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have 
become rich and finical, give you half the honest 
vanity, with which you flaunted it about in that 
pver-worn suit — your old corbeau — for four or 
five weeks longer than you should have done, to 
pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen 

— or sixteen shillings was it ? — a great affair we 
thought it then — which you had lavished on the 
old folio? Now you can afford to buy any book 
that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever 
bring me home any nice old purchases now. 

" When you came home with twenty apologies 



OLD CHINA. 225 

for laying out a less number of shillings upon that 
print after Lionardo, which we christened the ' Lady 
Blanche ; ' when you looked at the purchase, and 
thought of the money — and thought of the money, 
and looked again at the picture — was there no 
pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have 
nothing to do but to walk into Colnaghi's (as 

W calls it) and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. 

Yet do you? 

"Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to 
Enfield, and Potter's Bar, and Waltham, when we 
had a holyday — holydays, and all other fun, are 
gone, now we are rich — and the little hand-basket 
in which I used to deposit our day's fare of savoury 
cold lamb and salad — and how you would pry about 
at noon-tide for some decent house, where we might 
go in, and produce our store — only paying for the 
ale that you must call for — and speculate upon the 
looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to 
allow us a table-cloth, — and wish for such another 
honest hostess, as Izaak Walton has described many 
a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he 
went a fishing — and sometimes they would prove 
obliging enough, and sometimes they would look 
grudgingly upon us — but we had cheerful looks 
still for one another, and would eat our plain food 
savourily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout 
Hall? Now, when we go out a day's pleasuring, 



226 OLD CHINA. 

whicli is seldom moreover, we ride part of the way 
— and go into a fine inn, and order the best of din- 
ners, never debating the expense — which after all, 
never has half the relish of those chance country 
snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain 
usage, and a precarious welcome. 

" You are too proud to see a play anywhere now 
but in the pit or boxes. Do you remember where 
it was we used to sit, when we saw the Battle of 
Hexham, and the Surrender of Calais, and Bannis- 
ter and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the Wood — 
when we squeezed out our shillings a-piece to sit 
three or four times in a season in the one-shilling 
gallery — where you felt all the time that you ought 
not to have brought me — and more strongly I felt 
obligation to you for having brought me — and the 
pleasure was the better for a little shame — and when 
the curtain drew up, what cared we for our place in 
the house, or what mattered it where we were sitting, 
when our thoughts were with Kosalind in Arden, or 
with Viola at the Court of lUyria ? You used to say, 
that the gallery was the best place of all for enjoy- 
ing a play socially — that the relish of such exhibi- 
tions must be in proportion to the inf requency of 
going — that the company we met there, not being 
in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend 
the more, and did attend, to what was going on, on 
the stage — because a word lost would have been a 



OLD CHINA. 227 

chasm, wMch it was impossible for them to fill up. 
With such reflections we consoled our pride then — 
and I appeal to you, whether, as a woman, I met 
generally with less attention and accommodation, 
than I have done since iiil more expensive situations 
in the house? The getting in indeed, and the 
crowding up those inconvenient staircases, was bad 
enough, — but there was still a law of civility to 
women recognised to quite as great an extent as we 
ever found in the other passages — and how a little 
difficulty overcome heightened the snug seat, and 
the play, afterwards ! Now we can only pay our 
money, and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in 
the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard 
too, well enough then — but sight, and all, I think, 
is gone with our poverty. 

" There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before 
they became quite common — in the first dish of 
peas, while they were yet dear — to have them for a 
nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have 
now? If we were to treat ourselves now — that is, 
to have dainties a little above our means, it would 
be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more 
that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual 
poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat — 
when two people living together, as we have done, 
now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury, 
which both like ; while each apologises, and is will- 



228 OLD CHINA. 

ing to take both halves of the blame to his single 
share. I see no harm in people making much of 
themselves in that sense of the word. It may give 
them a hint how to make much of others. But 
now — what I mean by the word — we never do 
make much of ourselves. None but the poor can 
do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of all, but 
persons as we were, just above poverty. 

" I know what you were going to say, that it is 
mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all 
meet — and much ado we used to have every 
Thirty-first Night of December to account for our 
exceedings — many a long face did you make over 
your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it 
out how we had spent so much — or that we had 
not spent so much — or that it was impossible we 
should spend so much next year — and still we 
found our slender capital decreasing — but then, 
betwixt ways, and projects, and compromises of one 
sort or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, 
and doing without that for the future — and the 
hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in 
which you were never poor till now), we pocketed 
up our loss, and in conclusion, with 'lusty brim- 
mers ' (as you used to quote it out of hearty cheer- 
ful Mr. Cotton^ as you called him), we used to 
welcome in the 'coming guest.' Now, we have no 
reckoning at all at the end of an old year — no 



OLD CHINA. 229 

flattering promises about tlie new year doing better 
for us." 

Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occa- 
sions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I 
am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, 
however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which 
her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear 
income of poor — hundred pounds a year. "It is 
true we were happier when we were poorer, but we 
were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid we 
must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake 
the superflux into the sea, we should not much 
mend ourselves. That we had much to strusrsie 
with, as we grew up together, we have reason to be 
most thankful. It strengthened, and knit our com- 
pact closer. We could never have been what we 
have been to each other, if we had always had the 
sufficiency which you now complain of. The resist- 
ing power — those natural dilations of the youthful 
spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten — with 
us are long since passed away. Competence to age 
is supplemental youth; a sorry supplement indeed, 
but I fear the best that is to be had. We must 
ride, where we formerly walked : live better, and 
lie softer — and shall be wise to do so — than we 
had means to do in those good old days you speak 
of. Yet could those days return — could you and 
I once more walk our thirty miles a-day — could 



230 OLD CHINA. 

Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, and you 
and I be young to see tliem — could the good old 
one sliilling gallery days return — they are dreams, 
my cousin, now — but could you and I at this 
moment, instead of this quiet argument by our well- 
carpeted fire-side, sitting on this luxurious sofa — 
be once more struggling up those inconvenient 
stair-cases, pushed about, and squeezed, and elbowed 
by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers — 
could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of 
yours — and the delicious Thanh God^ lue are safe^ 
which always followed when the topmost stair, 
conquered, let in the first light of the whole cheer- 
ful theatre down beneath us — I know not the 
fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as 
I would be willing to bury more wealth in than 

Croesus had, or the great Jew R is supposed to 

have, to purchase it. And now do just look at that 
merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, 
big enough for a bed-tester, over the head of that 
pretty insipid half-Madonna-ish chit of a lady in 
that very blue summer-house." 



OLD CHINA. 231 



OLD CHINA. 

PAGE 

221 — The first play. This has been graphic- 
ally described in the essay, "My First Play." 

225 — Print after Lionardo. This seems to 
have been a great favorite with Lamb, and allusions 
to it are frequent. Mary Lamb wrote two poems 
on this print, both of which were published in the 
1818 edition of Lamb's works. 

230 — Jew R . Kothschild. 



232 BOOKS AND READING. 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND 

EEADING. 

Me. Lamb's taste in books is also fine, and it 
is peculiar. It is not the worse for a little idiosyii- 
crasy. He does not go deep into the Scotch nov- 
els, but he is at home in Smollett and Fielding. 
He is little read in Junius or Gibbon, but no man 
can give a better account of Burton's Anatomy of 
Melancholy, or Sir Thomas Brown's Urn-Burial, 
or Fuller's Worthies, or John Bunyan's Holy War. 
No one is more unimpressible to a specious decla- 
mation ; no one relishes a recondite beauty more. 
His admiration for Shakespear and Milton does not 
make him despise Pope ; and he can read Parnell 
with patience, and Gay with delight. His taste in 
French and German literature is somewhat defec- 
tive : nor has he made much progress in the science 
of Political Economy or other abstruse studies, 
though he has read vast folios of controversial 
divinity, merely for the sake of the intricacy of 
style, and to save himself the pain of thinking. 

— William Ilazlitt, 



BOOKS AND BEADING. 233 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND 

EEADING. 

To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the 
forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of 
quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural 
sprouts of his own. 

Lord Foppington in the Relapse. 

An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so 
much struck with this bright sally of his Lord- 
ship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the 
great improvement of his originality. At the 
hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must 
confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of 
my time to other people's thoughts. I dream away 
my life in others' speculations. I love to lose my- 
self in other men's minds. When I am not walk- 
ing, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books 
think for me. 

I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too 
genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can 



234 BOOKS AND READING. 

read anything wMcli I call a hoolc. There are 
things in that shape which I cannot allow for such. 

In this catalogue of books which are no books — 
biblia a-biblia — I reckon Court Calendars, Direc- 
tories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and 
lettered at the back, Scientific Treatises, Alma- 
nacks, Statutes at Large ; the works of Hume, 
Gibbon, Kobertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, 
generally, all those volumes which " no gentleman's 
library should be without:" the Histories of Fla- 
vins Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's 
Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I can 
read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste 
so catholic, so unexcluding. 

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these 
things in books^ clothing perched upon shelves, like 
false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into 
the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occu- 
pants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of 
a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted play-book, 
then, opening what "seem its leaves," to come bolt 
upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a 
Steele, or a Farquhar, and find — Adam Smith. 
To view a well-arranged assortment of blockheaded 
Encylopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set 
out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe 
of that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my 
shivering folios; would renovate Paracelsus him- 



BOOKS AND READING. 235 

self, and enable old Raymund Lully to look like 
himself again in the world. I never see these 
impostors, but I long to strip them, to warm my 
ragged veterans in their spoils. 

To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desid- 
eratum of a volume. Magnificence comes after. 
This, when it can be afforded, is not to be lavished 
upon all kinds of books indiscriminately. I would 
not dress a set of Magazines, for instance, in full 
suit. The dishabille, or haK-binding (with Russia 
backs ever) is our costume. A Shakespeare, or a 
Milton (unless the first editions), it were mere fop- 
pery to trick out in gay apparel. The possession 
of them confers no distinction. The exterior of 
them (the things themselves being so common), 
strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling 
sense of property in the owner. Thomson's Sea- 
sons, again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn, 
and dog's-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover 
of reading are the sullied leaves, and worn out 
appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia,) 
if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidious- 
ness, of an old " Circulating Library " Tom Jones, 
or Vicar of Wakefield ! How they speak of the 
thousand thumbs, that have turned over their pages 
with delight ! — of the lone sempstress, whom they 
may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working man- 
tua-maker) after her long day's needle-toil, running 



236 BOOKS AND EEADING. 

far into midniglit, when she has snatched an hour, 
ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some 
Lethean cnp, in spelling out their enchanting con- 
tents ! Who would have them a whit less soiled ? 
What better condition could we desire to see them 
in ? 

In some respects the better a book is, the less 
it demands from binding. Fielding, Smollett, 
Sterne, aiid all that class of perpetually self-repro- 
ductive volumes — Great Nature's Stereotypes — 
we see them individually perish with less regret, 
because we know the copies of them to be " eterne." 
But where a book is at once both good and rare 
— where the individual is almost the species, and 
when that perishes. 

We know not where is that Promethean torch 
That can its light relumine — 

such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke 
of Newcastle, by his Duchess — no casket is rich 
enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and 
keep safe such a jewel. 

Not only rare volumes of this description, which 
seem hopeless ever to be reprinted ; but old edi- 
tions of writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop 
Taylor, Milton in his prose- works. Fuller — of 
whom we have reprints, yet the books themselves, 
though they go about, and are talked of here and 



BOOKS AND READING. 237 

there, we know, liave not endenizened themselves 
(nor possibly ever will) in tlie national heart, so as 
to become stock books — it is good to possess these 
in durable and costly covers. I do not care for a 
First Folio of Shakespeare. I rather prefer the 
common editions of Rowe and Tonson, without 
notes, and with plates^ which, being so execrably 
bad, serve as maps, or modest remembrancers, to 
the text ; and without pretending to any supposable 
emulation with it, are so much better than the 
Shakespeare gallery engravings^ which did. I 
have a community of feeling with my countrymen 
about his Plays, and I like those editions of him 
best, which have been oftenest tumbled about and 
handled. — On the contrary, I cannot read Beau- 
mont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo edi- 
tions are painful to look at. I have no sympathy 
with them. If they were as much read as the cur- 
rent editions of the other poet, I should prefer them 
in that shape to the older one. I do not know a 
more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anat- 
omy of Melancholy. What need was there of 
unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great 
man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the 
newest fashion to modern censure? what hapless 
stationer could dream of Burton ever becomins" 
popular? — The wretched Malone could not do 
worse, when he bribed the sexton of Stratford 



238 BOOKS AND READING. 

cliurcli to let Mm white-wasli the painted effigy of 
old Shakespeare, which stood there, in rude but 
lively fashion depicted, to the very colour of the 
cheek, the eye, the eye-brow, hair, the very dress he 
used to wear — the only authentic testimony we had, 
however imperfect, of these curious parts and par- 
cels of him. They covered him over with a coat 

of white paint. By , if I had been a justice 

of peace for Warwickshire, I would have clapt both 
commentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a 
pair of meddling sacrilegious varlets. 

I think I see them at their work — these sapient 
trouble-tombs. 

Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that 
the names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and 
have a finer relish to the ear — to mine, at least — 
than that of Milton or of Shakespeare ? It may be, 
that the latter are more staled and rung upon in 
common discourse. The sweetest names, and which 
carry a perfume in the mention, are. Kit Marlowe, 
Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley. 

Much depends upon when and where you read a 
book. In the ^lyq or six impatient minutes, before 
the dinner is quite ready, who would think of tak- 
ing up the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume 
of Bishop Andre wes' sermons ? 

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music 
to be played before you enter upon him. But he 



BOOKS AND READING. 239 

brings his music, to which, who listens, had need 
bring docile thoughts, and purged ears. 

Winter evenings — the world shut out — with less 
of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At 
such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's 
Tale — 

These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud 
— to yourself, or (as it chances) to some single 
person listening. More than one — and it degen- 
erates into an audience. 

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for inci- 
dents, are for the eye to glide over only. It will 
not do to read them out. I could never listen to 
even the better kind of modern novels without 
extreme irksomeness. 

A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some 
of the Bank offices it is the custom (to save so 
much individual time) for one of the clerks — who 
is the best scholar — to commence upon the Times, 
or the Chronicle, and recite its entire contents aloud 
'pro hono publico. With every advantage of lungs 
and elocution, the effect is singularly vapid. In 
barbers' shops and public-houses a fellow will get 
up, and spell out a paragraph, which he communi- 
cates as some discovery. Another follows with Ms 
selection. So the entire journal transpires at length 
by piece-meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, 
and, without this expedient no one in the company 



240 BOOKS AND READING. 

would probably ever travel througli the contents 
of a whole paper. 

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever 
lays one down without a feeling of disappointment. 

What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at 
Nando's, keeps the paper! I am sick of hearing 
the waiter bawling out incessantly, " The Chronicle 
is in hand, Sir." 

Coming in to an inn at night — having ordered 
your supper — what can be more delightful than to 
find lying in the window-seat, left there time out of 
mind by the carelessness of some former guest — 
two or three numbers of the old Town and Country 
Magazine, with its amusing tete-a-tete pictures — ■ 

''The Royal Lover and Lady G ;" "The 

Meltino- Platonic and the old Beau;" — and such 
like antiquated scandal? Would you exchange it 

— at that time, and in that place — for a better 
book? • 

Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not 
regret it so much for the weightier kinds of reading 

— the Paradise Lost, or Comus, he could have read 
to him — but he missed the pleasure of skimming 
over with his own eye a magazine, or a light 
pamphlet. 

I should not care to be caught in the serious 
avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading 
Candide. > 



BOOKS AND READING. 241 



I do not remember a more whimsical surprise 
than having been once detected -by a famihar 
damsel-reclined at my ease upon the grass, on 
Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading - Pamela. 
There was nothing in the book to make a man seri- 
ously ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated 
herseH down by me, and seemed determined to read 
in company, I could have wished it had ^een-any 
other book. We read on very sociably for a few 
pa-es; and, not finding the author much to her 
Lte, she got up, and -went away. Gentle casu- 
ist I leave it to thee to conjecture, whether the 
blush Cfor there was one between us) was the prop- 
erty of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. 
From me you shall never get the secret. 

I am not much a friend to out-of-doors read- 
in. I cannot settle my spirits to it. I knew a 
Unitarian minister, who was generaUy to be seen 
upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner's-street was not), 
between the hours of ten and eleven in the morn- 
ing, studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to 
have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. 
I used to admire how he sidled along, keepmg clear 
of secular contacts. An illiterate enoomiter with a 
porter's knot, or a bread basket, would have quickly 
put to flight all the theology I am master of, and 
Lve left me worse than indifferent to the five 
points. 



242 BOOKS AND READING. 

There is a class of street-readers, whom I can 
never contemplate without affection — the poor gen- 
try, who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a 
book, filch a little learning at the open stalls — the 
owner, with his hard eye, casting envious looks at 
them all the while, and thinking when they will 
have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, 
expecting every moment when he shall interpose his 
interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves the 
gratification, they "snatch a fearful joy." Martin 

B , in this way, by daily fragments, got through 

two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper 
damped his laudable ambition, by asking him (it 
was in his younger days) whether he meant to 
purchase the work. M. declares, that under no cir- 
cumstances of his life did he ever peruse a book 
with half the satisfaction which he took in those 
uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has 
moralized upon this subject in two very touching 
but homely stanzas. 

I saw a boy with eager eye 

Open a book upon a stall, 

And read, as he'd devour it all ; 

Which when the stall-man did espy, 

Soon to the boy I heard him call, 

" You, Sir, you never buy a book, 

Therefore in one you shall not look." 

The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh 

He wish'd he never had been taught to read, 

Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need. 



BOOKS AND READING. 243 

Of sufferings the poor have many, 

Which never can the rich annoy : 

I soon perceiv'd another boy, 

Who look'd as if he'd not had any 

Food, for that day at least — enjoy 

The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. 

This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder, 

Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny, 

Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat : 

No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat. 



244 BOOKS AND READING. 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND 

READING. 

PAGE 

234 — My shivering folios. "I looked over 
Lamb's library in part. He has the finest collec- 
tion of shabby books I ever saw; such a number of 
first-rate works in very bad condition is, I think, 
nowhere to be found." — Henry Crahh Rohinson. 

236 — Lifo of the Duke of Newcastle. The 
full title of this odd and bizarre memoir, which 
Lamb so much affected, is "The LIFE of the 
Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince, William 
Cavendishe, Duke, Marquess, and Earl of New- 
castle ; Earl of Ogle; Viscount Mansfield; and 
Baron of Bolsover^ of Ogle^ Bothal and Hepple: 
Gentleman of His Majesties Bed-chamber; one of 
His Majesties most Honourable Privy-Councel ; 
Knight of the most Noble Order of the Garter; 
His Majesties Lieutenant of the County and Town 
of Nottingham ; and Justice in Ayre Trent-North : 
who had the honour to be Governour to our most 
Glorious King, and Gracious Soveraign, in his 



BOOKS AND READING. 245 

Youtli, when He was Prince of Wales; and soon 
after was made Captain General of all the Prov- 
inces beyond the River of Trent, and other Parts of 
the Kingdom of England, with Power, by a special 
Commission, to make Knights. Written By the 
thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princess, 
Margaret, Duchess o/* Newcastle, His 2d Wife,'' 

238 — Kit Marlowe, Drayton, &c. "If it is too 
much to say that he [Lamb] singly revived the six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries, it is because we 
see clearly that that revival was coming, and would 
have come even without his help. But he did more 
then recall attention to certain forgotten writers. 
He flashed a light from himself upon them, not 
only heightening every charm and deepening every 
truth, but making even their eccentricities beautiful 
and lovable. And in doing this he has linked his 
name forever with theirs." ^ — Alfred Ainger. 

240 — Candide. Voltaire's famous novel attack- 
ing religious and philosophical optimism. 

241 — Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded. By Sam- 
uel Richardson. 

242 — Martin B . Martin Burney, one of 

Lamb's dearest friends, whose judgment in literary 
matters was highly esteemed. 

242 — / saw a hoy &c. This is one of Mary 
Lamb's contributions to " Poetry for Children," 
referred to on page 14. 



246 IMPEEEECT SYMPATHIES. 



JEWS, QUAKERS, SCOTCHMEN, 

AND OTHER IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 

\London Alagazine, August, 182 1.] 

He [Lamb] was more pleasant to some persons 
(more pleasant, I confess to me) for the few faults 
or weaknesses that he had. He did not daunt us, 
nor throw us to a distance, by his formidable vir- 
tues. We sympathized with him ; and this sym- 
pathy, which is an union between two similitudes, 
does not exist between perfect and imperfect na- 
tures. Like all of us, he had a few prejudices : he 
did not like Frenchmen ; he shrunk from Scotch- 
men (excepting, however. Burns) ; he disliked bank- 
rupts ; he hated close bargainers. For the Jewish 
nation he maintained a mysterious awe. 

He liked chimney-sweepers — the young ones 
— the " innocent blacknesses " ; and with beggars he 
had a strong sympathy. — Bryan Waller Procter. 



IMPEEFECT SYMPATHIES. 217 



JEWS, QUAKERS, SCOTCHMEN, 

AND OTHER IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 

I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympa- 
thizeth with all things, I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, 
in anything. Those national repugnancies do not touch me, nor 
do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard, or 
Dutch. — Religio Medici. 

That the author of the Religio Medici, mounted 
upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about 
notional and conjectural essences, in whose catego- 
ries of Being the possible took the upper hand of 
the actual, should have overlooked the impertinent 
individualities of such poor concretions as mankind, 
is not much to be admired. It is rather to be won- 
dered at, that in the genus of animals he should 
have condescended to distinguish that species at all. 
For myself — earth-bound and fettered to the scene 
of my activities, — 



248 IMPEKFECT SYMPATHIES. 

Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky, 

I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, 
national or individual, to an unhealthy excess. I 
can look with no indifferent eye upon things or per- 
sons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or 
distaste ; or when once it becomes indifferent, it 
begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, 
a bundle of prejudices — made up of likings and 
dislikings — the veriest thrall to sympathies, dis- 
pathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it 
may be said of me, that I am a lover of my species. 
I can feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel 
towards them all equally. The more purely-English 
word that expresses sympathy will better explain 
my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, 
who upon another account cannot be my mate or 
fellow, I cannot like all people alike.* 

*I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of 
imperfect sympathies. To nations or classes of men there can be 
no direct antipathy. There may be individuals born and constel- 
lated so opposite to another individual nature, that the same 
sphere cannot hold them. I have met with my moral antipodes, 
and can believe the story of two persons meeting (who never saw 
one another before in their lives) and instantly fighting. 

We by proof find there should be 



'Twixt man and man such an antipathy. 
That though he can show no just reason why 
For any former wrong or injury, 



IMPERFECT SPMPATHIES. 249 

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, 
and am obliged to desist from the experiment in 
despair. They cannot like me — and in truth, I 
never knew one of that nation who attempted to do 
it. There is something more plain and ingenuous 
in their mode of proceeding. We know one another 
at first sight. There is an order of imperfect intel- 
lects (under which mine must be content to rank) 
which in its constitution is essentially anti-Caledo- 
nian. The owners of the sort of faculties I allude 
to have minds rather suggestive than comprehen- 
sive. They have no pretences to much clearness or 
precision in their ideas, or in their manner of 
expressing them. Their intellectual wardrobe (to 
confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They 
are content with fragments and scattered pieces of 

Can neither find a blemish in his fame, 
Nor aught in face or feature justly blame, 
Can challenge or accuse him of no evil, 
Yet notwithstanding hates him as a devil. 

The lines are from old Heywood's " Hierarchie of Angels," and 
he subjoins a curious story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who 
attempted to assassinate a King Ferdinand of Spain, and being 
put to the rack could give no other reason for the deed but an 
inveterate antipathy which he had taken to the fi.rst sight of the 
King. 

The cause which to that act compell'd him 



Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld him. 



250 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 

Truth. She presents no full front to them — a fea- 
ture or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, 
germs and crude essays at a system, is the utmost 
they pretend to. They beat up a little game per- 
adventure — and leave it to knottier heads, more 
robust constitutions, to run it down. The light that 
lights them, is not steady and polar, but mutable 
and shifting; waxing, and again waning. Their 
conversation is accordingly. They will throw out a 
random word in or out of season, and be content to 
let it pass for what it is worth. They cannot speak 
always as if they were upon their oath — but must 
be understood, speaking or writing, with some abate- 
ment. They seldom wait to mature a proposition, 
but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They 
delight to impart their defective discoveries as they 
arise, without waiting for their full developement. 
They are no systematizers, and would but err more 
by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, 
are suggestive merely. The brain of a true Caledo- 
nian (if I am not mistaken) is constituted upon 
quite a different plan. Its Minerva is born in pan- 
oply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in 
their growth — if indeed, they do grow, and are 
not rather put together upon principles of clock- 
work. You never catch his mind in an undress. 
He never hints or suggests anything, but unlades 
his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness. 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 251 

He has no falterings of self-suspicion. Surmises, 
guesses, suppositions, half -intuitions, demi-conscious- 
nesses, misgiving's, partial illuminations, "dim in- 
stincts," embryo conceptions and every stage that 
stops short of absolute certainty and conviction — his 
intellectual faculty seems a stranger to. He brings 
his total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks 
it. His riches are always about him. He never 
stoops to catch a glittering something in your pres- 
ence, to share it with you before he quite knows 
whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry 
halves to anything that he j&nds. He does not find, 
but bring. You never witness his first apprehen- 
sion of a thing. His understanding is always at its 
meridian — you never see the first dawn, the early 
streaks. The twilight of dubiety never falls upon 
him. Is he orthodox — he has no doubts. Is he an 
infidel — he has none either. Between the affirma- 
tive and the negative there is no border-land with 
him. You cannot hover with him upon the confines 
of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argu- 
ment. He always keeps the j)ath. You cannot 
make excursions with him — for he sets you right. 
His taste never fluctuates. His morality never 
abates. He cannot compromise, or understand mid- 
dle actions. There can be but a right and a wrong. 
His conversation is as a book. His affirmations 
have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon 



252 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 

the square with him. He stops a metaphor like 
a suspected person in an enemy's country. "A 
healthy book!" — said one of his countrymen to 
me, who had ventured to give that appellation to 
John B uncle, — "did I catch rightly what you said? 
I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy 
state of body, but I do not see how that epithet can 
be properly applied to a book." Above all, you 
must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledo- 
nian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you 
are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember 
you are upon your oath. — I have a print of a grace- 
ful female after Leonardo da Yinci, which I was 
showinof off to Mr. ****. After he had examined 
it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked my 
BEAUTY (a foolish name it goes by among my 
friends) — when he very gravely assured me, that 
" he had considerable respect for my character and 
talents " (so he was pleased to say), " but had not 
given himself much thought about the degree of my 
personal pretensions." The misconception staggered 
me, but did not seem much to disconcert him. — 
Persons of this nation are particularly fond of 
affirming a truth — which nobody doubts. They do 
not so properly affirm, as annunciate it. They do 
indeed appear to have such a love of truth — as if, 
like virtue, it were valuable for itself — that all 
truth becomes equally valuable, whether the propo- 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 253 

sition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or 
such as is impossible to become a subject of disputa- 
tion. I was present not long since at a party of 
North Britons where a son of Burns was expected ; 
and happened to drop a silly expression (in my 
South British way), that I wished it were the 
father instead of the son — when four of them 
started up at once to inform me, that "that was 
impossible, because he was dead." An impractica- 
ble wish, it seems, was more than they could con- 
ceive. Swift has hit off this part of their character, 
namely their love of truth, in his biting way, but 
with an illiberality that necessarily confines the pas- 
sage to the margin.* The tediousness of the Scotch 
is certainly proverbial. I wonder if they ever tire 
one another ! — In my early life I had a passionate 
fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have some- 
times foolislily hoped to ingratiate myself with his 
countrymen by expressing it. But I have always 
found that a true Scot resents your admiration of 

* There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit 
themselves, and entertain their company with relating facts of no 
consequence, not at all out of the road of such common incidents 
as happen every day ; and this I have observed more frequently 
among the Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not 
to omit the minutest circumstances of time or place ; which kind 
of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the uncouth terms 
and phrases, as well as accent and gesture peculiar to that coun- 
try, would be hardly tolerable. — Hints towards an Essay on 
Conversation. 



254 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 

his compatriot, even more than he would your con- 
tempt of him. The latter he imputes to your "im- 
perfect acquaintance with many of the words which 
he uses ; " and the same objection makes it a pre- 
sumption in you to suppose that you can admire 
him. I have a great mind to give up Burns. There 
is certainly a bragging spirit of generosity, a swag- 
gering assertion of independence, and all that^ in his 
writings. Thomson they seem to have forgotten. 
Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven 
for his delineation of Rory and his companion, upon 
their first introduction to our metropolis. — Speak 
of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort 
upon you Hume's History compared with Jiis Con- 
tinuation of it. What if the historian had continued 
Humphrey Clinker? 

I have in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. 
They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared 
with which, Stonehenge is in its nonage. They 
date beyond the pyramids. But I should not care 
to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of 
that nation. I confess that I have not the nerves 
to enter their synagogues. Old prejudices cling 
about me. I cannot shake off the story of Hugh of 
Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate, 
on the one side, — of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, 
and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, 
must, and ought, to affect the blood of the children. 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 255 

I cannot believe it can run clear and kindly yet ; or 
that a few fine words, such as candour, liberality, 
the light of a nineteenth century, can close up the 
breaches of such a mighty antipathy. A Hebrew is 
no where congenial to me. He is least distasteful 
on 'Change — for the mercantile spirit levels all dis- 
tinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly 
confess that I do not relish the approximation of 
Jew and Christian, which has become so fashiona- 
ble. The reciprocal endearments have, to me, some- 
thing hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not 
like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing and 
congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civil- 
ity. If they are converted, why do they not come 
over to us altogether? Why keep up a form of sep- 
aration, when the life of it is fled? If they can sit 
with us at table, why do they kick at our cookery? 
I do not understand these half convertites. Jews 
christianizing — Christians judaizing — puzzle me. 
I like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more con- 
founding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. The 
spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative. 

B would have been more in keeping if he had 

abided by the faith of his forefathers. There is a 

fine scorn in his face, which nature meant to be 

of Christians. The Hebrew spirit is strong in him 
in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer the 
Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings. 



256 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 

"The Children of Israel passed through the Red 
Sea! " The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyp- 
tians to him, and he rides over our necks in triumph. 

There is no mistaking him. — B has a strong 

expression of sense in his countenance, and it is 
comfirmed by his singing. The foundation of his 
vocal excellence is sense. He sings with under- 
standing, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would 
sing the Commandments, and give an appropriate 
character to each prohibition. His nation, in gen- 
eral, have not over-sensible countenances. How 
should they? — but you seldom see a silly expres- 
sion among them. Gain, and the pursuit of gain, 
sharpen a man's visage. I never heard of an idiot 
being born among them. — Some admire the Jewish 
female physiognomy. I admire it — but with 
trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrutable 
eyes. 

In the negro countenance you will often meet 
with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearn- 
ings of tenderness towards some of these faces — or 
rather masks — that have looked out kindly upon 
one in casual encounters in the streets and high- 
ways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls — these 
"images of God cut in ebony." But I should not 
like to associate with them, to share my meals 
and my good-nights with them — because they are 
black. 



IMPEKFECT SYMPATHIES. 257 

I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I ven- 
erate the Quaker prmciples. It does me good for 
the rest of the day, when I meet any of their people 
in my path. When I am ruffled or disturbed by 
any occurrence, the sight, or quiet voice of a Quak- 
er, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, 
and taking off a load from the bosom. But I can- 
not like the Quakers (as Desdemona would say) 
"to live with them." I am all over sophisticated — 
with humours, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. 
I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, 
scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim- 
whams, which their simpler taste can do without. 
I should starve at their primitive banquet. My 
appetites are too high for the sallads which (accord- 
ing to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto 
too excited 

To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse. 

The indirect answers which Quakers are often 
found to return to a question put to them, may be 
explained, I think, without the vulgar assumption, 
that they are more given to evasion and equivoca- 
ting than other people. They naturally look to 
their words more carefully, and are more cautious 
of committing themselves. They have a peculiar 
character to keep up on this head. They stand in 



258 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 

a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law 
exempted from taking an oath. The custom of 
resorting to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as 
it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be 
confessed) to introduce into the laxer sort of minds 
the notion of two kinds of truth — the one applica- 
ble to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to 
the common proceedings of daily intercourse. As 
truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be 
but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop 
and the market-place, a latitude is expected, and 
conceded upon questions wanting this solemn cove- 
nant. Something less than truth satisfies. It is 
common to hear a person say, "You do not expect 
me to speak, as if I were upon my oath." Hence a 
great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short 
of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation ; and 
a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where 
clergy-truth — oath-truth, by the nature of the cir- 
cumstances, is not required. A Quaker knows 
none of this distinction. His simple affirmation 
being received, upon the most sacred occasions, with- 
out any further test, stamps a value upon the words 
which he is to use upon the most indifferent top- 
ics of life. He looks to them, naturally, with more 
severity. You can have of him no more than his 
word. He knows, if he is caught tripping in a 
casual expression, he forfeits, for himseK at least, 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 259 

his claim to the invidious exemption. He knows, 
that his syllables are weighed — and how far a con- 
sciousness of this particular watchfulness, exerted 
against a person, has a tendency to produce indirect 
answers, and a diverting of the question by honest 
means, might be illustrated, and the practice justi- 
fied, by a more sacred example than is proper to be 
more than hinted at upon this occasion. The admir- 
able presence of mind, which is notorious in Quak- 
ers upon all contingencies, might be traced to this 
imposed self -watchfulness — if it did not seem 
rather an humble and secular scion of that old 
stock of religious constancy, which never bent or 
faltered, in the Primitive Friends, or gave way to 
the winds of persecution, to the violence of judge 
or accuser, under trials and racking examinations. 
" You will never be the wiser, if I sit here answer- 
ing your questions till midnight," said one of those 
upright Justicers to Penn, who had been putting 
law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. "Thereafter as 
the answers may be," retorted the Quaker. The 
astonishing composure of this j)eople is sometimes 
ludicrously displayed in lighter instances. I was 
travelling in a stage-coach v/ith three male Quakers, 
buttoned up in the straitest non-conformity of their 
sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a 
meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set 
before us. My friends confined themselves to the 



260 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 

tea-table. I in my way took supper. When the 
landlady brought in the bill, the eldest of my com- 
panions discovered that she had charged for both 
meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was very 
clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments 
were used on the part of the Quakers, for which 
the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no 
means a fit recipient. The guard came in with 
his usual peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled 
out their money, and formally tendered it — so 
much for tea — I, in humble imitation, tendering 
mine — for the supper which I ha,d taken. She 
would not relax in her demand. So they all three 
quietly put up their silver, as did myself, and 
marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest 
going first, with myself closing up the rear, who 
thought I could not do better than follow the exam- 
ple of such grave and warrantable personages. We 
got in. f The steps went up. The coach drove off. 
The murmurs of mine hostess, not very indistinctly 
or ambiguously pronounced, became after a time 
inaudible — and now my conscience, which the 
whimsical scene had foi' a while suspended, begin- 
ning to give some twitches, I waited, in - the hope 
that some justification would be offered by these > 
serious persons for the seeming injustice of their 
conduct. To my great i^urprise, not a syllable was 
dropped on the subject. They sate as mute as at a 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 261 

a meeting. At length the eldest of them broke 
silence, by enquiring of his next neighbour, "Hast 
thee heard how indigos go at the India House?" 
and the question operated as a soporific on my 
moral feeling as far as Exeter. 



262 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 



JEWS, QUAKEKS, SCOTCHMEN, 

AND OTHER IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 

PAGE 

248 — A lover of my species. " The truth then 
is, that Lamb was what is by no means so uncom- 
mon or so contradictory a character as the unobser- 
vant may deem it; he was a gentle, amiable, and 
tender-hearted misanthrope. He hated and despised 
men with his mind and judgment, in proportion as 
(and precisely because) he loved and yearned 
towards them in his heart; and individually, he 
loved those best whom everybody else hated, and 
for the very reasons for which others hated them." 
• — P. G. Pat'}nore. 

253 — Passionate fondness for the poetry of 
Burns. "Burns, indeed, was always one of his 

[Lamb's] greatest favorites I have 

more than once heard him repeat, in a fond tender 



IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 263 

■| 

voice, when the subject of poets or poetry came 
under discussion, the following beautiful lines from 
the Epistle to Simpson of Ochiltree. 

* The Muse, nae poet ever fand her, 
Till by himsel he learn'd to wander, 
Adown some trotting burn's meander 
An' no think 't lang.' " 

— Bryan Waller Procter, 

254 — Hugh of Lincoln. A boy, eight years old, 
said to have been stolen, tortured, and crucified by 
the Jews, in 1255, for taking part in which affair, 
eighteen of the wealthiest Jews of Lincoln were 
hanged. 

255 — B . John Braliam, a celebrated Eng- 
lish vocalist, converted from Judaism to Christianity. 

257 — I love Quaher ways. In a letter to Col- 
eridge, Feb. 13, 1797, Lamb wrote: "Tell Lloyd 
I have had thoughts of turning Quaker, and have 

been reading William Penn's No 

Cross, no Crown. I like it immensely. Unluckily 
I went to one of his meetings, tell him, in St. John 
Street, yesterday .... That cured me of 
Quakerism. I love it in the books of Penn and. 
Woolman ; but I detest the vanity of a man think- 
ing he speaks by the Spirit, when what he says an 
ordinary man might say without all that quaking 
and trembling." 



264 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES. 

259 — Three, male Quakers. In 1823, Lamb 
wrote to liis friend, Bernard Barton, himself a 
Quaker ; " The Quaker story did not happen to me, 
but to Carlisle, the surgeon, from whose mouth 1 
have twice heard it." 



AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 265 



CHAKLES LAMB. 

AHi AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

[JVew Monthly Magazine, April, 1835.] 

We have been favored, by the kindness of Mr. 
Upcott, with the following sketch, written in one of 
his manuscript collections by Charles Lamb. It 
will be read with deep interest by all, but with the 
deepest interest by those who had the honor and 
happiness of knowing the writer. It is so singularly 
characteristic that we can hardly persuade ourselves 
we do not hear it, as we read, spoken from his 
living lips. Slight as it is, it conveys the most 
exquisite and perfect notion of the personal man- 
ners and habits of our friend Mark 

its humor, crammed into a few thinking words ; its 

pathetic sensibility in the midst of contrast; its wit, 

truth, and feeling; and, above all, its fanciful 

retreat, at the close, under a phantom cloud of 

death. 

— Prefatory note, to the sketchy hy editor of the 

magazine. 



266 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



CHAELES LAMB. 

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

Charles Lamb, born in tlie Inner Temple, lOtli 
February, 1775, educated in Christ's Hospital; 
afterwards a clerk in the Accountant's Office, East 
India House ; pensioned off from that service, 1825, 
after thirty-three years service ; is now a gentleman 
at large ; — can remember few specialties in his life 
worth noting, except that he once caught a swallow 
flying (teste sua mantT) ; below the middle stature ; 
cast of face slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tinge in 
his complexional religion ; stammers abominably, 
and is therefore more apt to discharge his occa- 
sional conversation in a quaint aphorism or a j)oor 
quibble, than in set and edifying speeches ; has con- 
sequently been libelled as a person always aiming at 
wit, which, as he told a dull fellow that charged 
him with it, is at least as good as aiming at dull- 
ness. A small eater but not drinker ; confesses a 
partiality for the production of the jmiiper berry; 



AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 267 

was a fierce smoker of tobacco, but may be resem- 
bled to a volcano burnt out, emitting only now and 
then a casual puff. Has been guilty of obtruding 
upon the public a tale in prose, called Eosamund 
Gray ; a dramatic sketch, named John Woodvil ; a 
Farewell Ode to Tobacco; with sundry other 
poems, and light prose matter, collected in two 
slight crown octavos, and pompously christened his 
works, though in fact they were his recreations, and 
his true works may be found on the shelves of 
Leadenhall-street, filling some hundred folios. He 
is also the true Elia, whose essays are extant in a 
little volume, published a year or two since, and 
rather better known from that name without a 
meaning, than from any thing he has done, or can 
hope to do, in his own. • He also was the first to 
draw the public attention to the old English Dram- 
atists, in a work called "Specimens of English 
Dramatic Writers," who lived about the time of 
Shakspeare, published about fifteen years since. In 
short, all his merits and demerits to set forth, would 
take to the end of Mr. Upcott's book, and then not 
be told truly. 

He died 18 much lamented.* 

Witness his hand, Charles Lamb. 
18th April, 1827. 

* To anybody — please to fill up these blanks. 



268 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



CHAELES LAMB. 

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

[Mr. Upcott, referred to in the prefatory note and in the essay, 
was assistant librarian of the London Institution, and one of the 
contributors to a " Biographical Dictionary of Living Authors of 
Great Britain and Ireland," in 1816. Mr. Ainger thinks it proba- 
ble that it was for a proposed new edition of this Dictionary, that 
Lamb wrote this autobiographical sketch. E. D. H.] 

PAGE 

266 — Face slightly Jewish. "I do not know 
whether Lamb had any oriental blood in his veins ; 
but certainly the most marked complexional charac- 
teristic of his head was a Jewish look, which per- 
vaded every portion of it, even to the sallow and 

uniform complexion The nose, too, was 

large and slightly hooked, and the chin rounded and 
elevated to correspond. There was altogether a 
Rahhinical look about Lamb's head which was at 
once striking and impressive." — P. G. Patmore. 

266 — Stammers abominably. " He stammered 
a little, pleasantly, just enough to prevent his 



AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 269 

making speeches; just enough to make you listen 
eagerly for his words." — Bryan Waller Procter. 

266 — Quaint aphorism. "The habit of playing 
on words was a part of him through life, and as in 
the case of most who indulge in it, became an outlet 
for whatever mood was for the moment dominant in 
Charles Lamb's mind. When he was ill at ease, 
and in an attitude (as he often was) of antagonism 
to his company, it would take the shape of a 
wanton interruption of the argument under discus- 
sion .... When he was annoyed, he made 
annoying puns; when he was frivolous, he made 
frivolous j)uns ; but when he was in the cue, and his 
surroundings were such as to call forth his better 
powers, he put into this form of wit humor and 
imagination of a high order." — Alfred Aijiger. 

267 — Farewell Ode to Tobacco. "It was one 
of those very few pieces in metre which are worthy 
of the prose Elia^ and deserve to be bound up with 
it." — William Carew Hazlitt. 



270 CHARACTER Of THE LATE ELIA. 



A CHAKACTER OF THE LATE ELIA, 

BY A FRIEND. 

[London Magazine, January, 1823.] 

Charles Lamb lias drawn for us a character of 
himself, but, so fond was he of hoaxes and mystifi- 
cations of this kind, that we might have hesitated 
to accept it as faithful, were it not in such precise 

accord with the testimony of others 

When a man's account of himself — his foibles and 
eccentricities — is confirmed in minatest detail by 
those who knew and loved him best, it is reasonable 
to conclude that we are not far wrong in accepting 
it ... . The peculiarities which Lamb here 
enumerates are just those which are little likely ever 
to receive gentle consideration from the world. 

— Alfred Ainger. 



CHAKACTER OF THE LATE ELI A. 271 



A GHARACTEE OF THE LATE ELIA, 

BY A FRIEND. 

This gentleman, who for some months past had 
been in a declining way, hath at length paid his 
final tribute to nature. He just lived long enough 
(it was what he wished) to see his papers collected 
into a volume. The pages of the LONDON 
MAGAZINE will henceforth know him no more. 

Exactly at twelve last night his queer spirit 
departed, and the bells of Saint Bride's rang him 
out with the old year. The mournful ^dbrations 
were caught in the dining room of his friends T. 
and H. ; and the company, assembled there to wel- 
come in another First of January, checked their 
carousals in mid-mirth, and were silent. Janus 

wept. The gentle P r, in a whisper, signified 

his intention of devoting an Elegy; and Allan 
C , nobly forgetful of his countrymen's wrongs, 



2T2 CHARACTER OF THE LATE ELI A. 

vowed a Memoir to Ms manes^ full and friendly as 
a Tale of Lyddalcross. 

To say truth, it is time lie were gone. The 
humour of the thing, if there was ever much in it, 
was pretty well exhausted ; and a two years' and a 
half existence has been a tolerable duration for a 
phantom. 

I am now at liberty to confess, that much which 
I have heard objected to my late friend's writings 
was well-founded. Crude they are, I grant you — 
a sort of unlicked, incondite things — villianously 
pranked in an effected array of antique modes and 
phrases. They had not been his^ if they had been 
other than such; and better it is, that a writer 
should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than 
to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be 
strange to him. Egotistical they have been pro- 
nounced by some who did not know, that what he 
tells us, as of himself, was often true only (histor- 
ically) of another ; as in his Fourth Essay (to save 
many instances) — where under the first person 
(his favourite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn 
estate of a country-boy placed at a London school, 
far from his friends and connections — in direct 
opposition to his own early history. If it be ego- 
tism to imply and twine with his own identity the 
griefs and affections of another — making himself 
many, or reducing many unto himself — then is the 



CHAEACTER OF THE LATE ELI A. 273 

skilful novelist, who all along brings in his hero, or 
heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist 
of all; who yet has never, therefore, been accused 
of that narrowness. And how shall the intenser 
dramatist escape being faulty, who doubtless, under 
cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes 
gives blameless vent to his most inward feelings, 
and expresses his own story modestly? 

My late friend was in many respects a singular 
character. Those who did not like him, hated him ; 
and some, who once liked him, afterwards became 
his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself 
too little concern what he uttered, and in whose 
presence. He observed neither time nor place, and 
would e'en out with what came uppermost. With 
the severe religionist he would pass for a free- 
thinker ; while the other faction set him down for 
a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his 
sentiments. Few understood him; and I am not 
certain that at all times he quite understood him- 
self. He too much affected that dangerous figure 
— irony. He sowed doubtfid speeches, and reaped 
plain, unequivocal hatred. — He would interrupt 
the gravest discussion with some light jest ; and 
yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could 
understand it. Your long and much talkers hated 
him. The informal habit of his mind, joined to an 
inveterate impediment of speech, forbade him to be 



274 CHARACTER OF THE LATE ELIA. 

an orator ; and lie seemed determined that no one 
else should play that part when he was present. 
He was jjetit and ordinary in his person and 
appearance. I have seen him sometimes in what 
is called good company, but where he has been a 
stranger, sit silent, and be suspected for an odd fel- 
low ; till some unlucky occasion provoking it, he 
would stutter out some senseless pun (not alto- 
gether senseless perhaps, if rightly taken), which 
has stamped his character for the evening. It was 
hit or miss with him ; but nine times out of ten, he 
contrived by this device to send away a whole com- 
pany his enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier 
than his utterance, and his happiest wijjrom'ptiis 
had the appearance of effort. He has been ac- 
cused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was 
but struggling to give his poor thoughts articula- 
tion. He chose his companions for some individu- 
ality of character which they manifested. — Hence, 
not many persons of science, and few professed lit- 
erati^ were of his councils. They were, for the 
most part, persons of an uncertain fortune ; and, as 
to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious 
than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) 
income, he passed with most of them for a great 
miser. To my knowledge this was a mistake. His 
intimados^ to confess a truth, were in the world's 
eye a ragged regiment. He found them floating on 



CHARACTER OF THE LATE ELIA. 275 

the surface of society ; and the colour, or something 
else, in the weed pleased him. The burrs stuck to 

him but they were good and loving burrs for all 

that. He never greatly cared for the society of 
what are called good people. If any of these were 
scandalised (and offences were sure to arise), he 
could not help it. When he has been remonstrated 
with for not making more concessions to the feel- 
ings of good people, he would retort by asking, 
what one point did these good people ever concede 
to him ? He was temperate in his meals and diver- 
sions, but always kept a little on this side of abste- 
miousness. Only in the use of the Indian weed he 
might be thought a little excessive. He took it, 
he would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry — as 
the friendly vapour ascended, how his prattle would 
curl up sometimes with it! the ligaments, which 
tongue-tied him, were loosened, and the stammerer 
proceeded a statist ! 

I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or 
rejoice that my old friend is departed. His jests 
were beginning to grow obsolete, and his stories to 
be found out. He felt the approaches of age ; and 
while he pretended to cling to life, you saw how 
slender were the ties left to bind him. Discoursing 
with him latterly on this subject, he expressed him- 
self with a pettishness, which I thought unworthy 
of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat 



276 CHARACTER OF THE LATE ELI A. 

(as he called it) at Sliacklewell, some children 
belonging to a school of industry had met us, and 
bowed and curtseyed, as he thought, in an especial 
manner to Mm. "They take me for a visiting gov- 
ernor," he muttered earnestly. He had a horror, 
which he carried to a foible, of looking like any- 
thing important and parochial. He thought that 
he approached nearer to that stamp daily. He had 
a general aversion from being treated like a grave 
or respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon 
the advances of age that should so entitle him. He 
herded always, while it was possible, with people 
younger than himself. He did not conform to the 
march of time, but was dragged along in the pro- 
cession. His manners lagged behind his years. 
He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis 
never sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impres- 
sions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented 
the impertinence of manhood. These were weak- 
nesses ; but such as they were, they are a key to 
explicate some of his writings. 

He left little property behind him. Of course, 
the little that is left (chiefly in India bonds) 
devolves upon his cousin Bridget. A few critical 
dissertations were found in his escrutoire, which 
have been handed over to the Editor of this Mag- 
azine, in which it is to be hoped they will shortly 
appear, retaining his accustomed signature. 



CHAEACTER OF THE LATE ELIA. 277 

He has himself not obscurely hinted that his 
employment lay in a public office. The gentlemen 
in the Export department of the East India House 
will forgive me, if I acknowledge the readiness with 
which they assisted me in the retrieval of his few 
manuscripts. They pointed out in a most obliging 
manner the desk, at which he had been planted for 
forty years ; showed me ponderous tomes of figures, 
in his own remarkably neat hand, which, more 
properly than his few printed tracts, might be called 
his "Works." They seemed afPectionate to his 
memory, and universally commended his expertness 
in book-keeping. It seems he was the inventor of 
some ledger, which should combine the precision 
and certainty of the Italian double-entry (I think 
they called it) with the brevity and facility of some 
newer German system — but I am not able to 
appreciate the worth of the discovery. I have 
often heard him express a warm regard for his asso- 
ciates in office, and how fortunate he considered 
himself in having his lot thrown in amongst them. 
There is more sense, more discourse, more shrewd- 
ness, and even talent, among these clerks (he would 
say) than in twice the number of authors by pro- 
fession that I have conversed with. He would 
brighten up sometimes upon the "old days of the 
India House," when he consorted with Woodroffe 
and Wissett, and Peter Corbet (a descendant and 



278 CHARACTER OF THE LATE ELI A. 

worthy representative, bating the point of sanctity, 
of old facetious Bishop Corbet), and Hoole who 
translated Tasso, and Bartlemy Brown whose father 
(God assoil him therefore) modernized Walton — 
and sly warm-hearted old Jack Cole (King Cole 
they called him in those days), and Campe, and 
Fombelle — , and a world of choice spirits, more 
than I can remember to name, who associated in 
those days with Jack Burrell (the hon vivant of the 
South Sea House), and little Eyton (said to be a 
/ac simile of Pope — he was a miniature of a 
gentleman) that was cashier under him, and Dan 
Voight of the Custom House, that left the famous 
library. 

Well, Elia is gone — for aught I know, to be 
reunited with them — and these poor traces of his 
pen are all we have to show for it. How little sur- 
vives of the wordiest authors ! Of all they said or 
did in their life-time, a few glittering words only ! 
His Essays found some favourers, as they appeared 
separately; they shuffled their way in the crowd 
well enough singly ; how they will read^ now they 
are brought together, is a question for the j)ublish- 
ers, who have thus ventured to draw out into one 
piece his " weaved-up follies." 



CHARACTER OP THE LATE ELIA, 279 



A CHARACTER OF THE LATE ELIA. 

[The first issue of the London for 1823 contained an essay, 
*' Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age," signed Elia^s 
Ghost, and this pseudo-biographical sketch, signed Phil-Elia, in 
which, it would seem. Lamb seriously contemplated abandoning 
his fictitious name, and, possibly, retiring altogether from maga- 
zine-writing. Yet, the next issue contained an announcement of 
a new series of articles by " the author of the Essays of Elia," 
and, although not so regularly as heretofore, they continued to 
appear as long as the Magazine was published. So that the 
object of the farewell is not clear, unless it be that Lamb did 
really intend to renounce the name ("the sickening Elia," he 
called it), and was persuaded to change his mind after the fare- 
well was written, or even in type. We know that he was tired of 
writing, for in a letter to Bernard Barton written about this time, 
he says : " They have dragged me again into the magazine, but I 
feel the spirit of the thing in my own mind quite gone. ' Some 
brains' (I think Ben Jonson says it) 'will endure but one skim- 
ming'." Again, a little later, he writes to the same friend, "The 
same indisposition to write has stopped my ' Elias ', but you will 
see a futile effort in the next number, 'wrung from me with slow 
pain'." Yet this "futile effort" was the exquisite memory-sketch, 
*'Blakesmoor in H shire! " E. D. H.] 

PAGE 

271 — T. and H. Taylor and Hessey, pub- 
lishers of the London Magazine. When they 



280 CHAKACTER OF THE LATE ELIA. 

purchased the magazine, they opened a house in 
Waterloo Place, where the contributors met once 
a month at an excellent dinner. In his Memoir of 
Charles Lamb, Procter has graphically described 
these dinners and the assembled company. 

271 — Janus. The notorious Thomas Griffiths 
Waine Wright, then writing art criticisms over the 
name of " Janus Weathercock." 

271 — P T. Bryan Waller Procter, who 

afterward^ wrote a memoir of Lamb. 

271 — Allan C . Allan Cunningham, who, 

in spite of his Scotch birth and breeding, was one 
of Lamb's friends. 

272 — Antique modes and phrases. "The style 
of the Essays of Elia is liable to the charge of a 
certain mannerism. His sentences are cast in the 
mould of old authors ; his expressions are borrowed 
from them; but his feelings and observations are 
genuine and original, taken from actual life." 
— William Hazlitt. 

272 — Egotistical. "This egotism — it is almost 

superfluous to mark — is a dominant characteristic 

of Lamb's manner .... This ' I ' of Lamb 

is no concession to an idle curiosity, nor is 

it in fact biographical at all." — Alfred Ainger. 

272 — Fourth Essay. "Christ's Hospital Five 
and Thirty Years Ago," the fourth in the Elian 
series. 



CHARACTER OF THE LATE ELI A. 281 

273 — Those who did not like him. "To those 
^ wlio did not know him, or, knowing, did not or 
could not appreciate him. Lamb often passed for 
something between an imbecile, a brute, and a buf- 
foon ; and the first impression he made on ordinary 

people was always unfavorable sometimes to a 

violent and repulsive degree." — P. G. Patmore, 

273 — Sowed doubtful sjjeeehe 8. William Haz- 
litt says of Lamb's conversation: "No one ever 
stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent 
things in half a dozen half sentences as he does. 
His jests scald like tears : and he probes a question 
with a play upon words. What a keen, laughing, 
hair-brained vein of home-felt truth I What choice 
venom ! " 

274 — Senseless pun. "His [Lamb's] puns 
were admirable, and often contained as deep tilings 
as the wisdom of some who have greater names." 
— Leigh Hunt. 

214: — His companions. "None of Lamb's inti- 
mates were persons of title or fashion, or of any 
political importance. They were reading men, or 
authors, or old friends who had no name or preten- 
sions None of them ever forsook him : 

they loved him." — Brya7i Waller Procter. 



FINIS. 



^ 
^ 







'& 



^^%l 



liilliP 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





014 494 841 5 




